Le Palais Contarini (Potsdam)

What you are looking at

A Renaissance palace front fills the upper half of the canvas, cut off by the top edge between its first and second floors. Arched windows, a central loggia with a band of red, roundels of colored marble and the dark mouth of a water door are all there, but painted in a haze of blue, violet, green and pink, as if seen through evening air. Four tall wooden mooring posts, the pali, stand in front of it in strong brown. The lower half of the picture is the Grand Canal: a broad field of short horizontal strokes in blue, violet, green and gold, in which the palace's reflection is reduced to a few darker patches.

There is no sky, no boat and no figure. The composition is two horizontal bands, building and water, stitched together by the vertical posts. Monet signed and dated it "Claude Monet 1908" at lower left.

Look at the facade closely and the ornament is more precise than it first seems: the arches, the roundels and the balcony are all placed accurately. Monet keeps the architecture but changes its substance, turning stone into colored light.

Where and when it was painted

In the autumn of 1908 Monet, then 68, went to Venice for the first and only time, with his wife Alice. They arrived at the beginning of October at the invitation of Mary Young Hunter, an American hostess he had met in London, and stayed first at the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal, then at the Hotel Britannia, leaving in early December. Monet had been reluctant to go, saying the city was too beautiful to be painted, but once there he worked every day on the palaces, the lagoon and the light. He brought back 37 canvases, which he reworked in his studio at Giverny over the next years. Twenty-nine were shown at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1912, a year after Alice's death.

Eleven of his 37 Venetian compositions show palaces at close range: four of the Palazzo Dario, three of the Palazzo Ducale, and two each of the Palazzo da Mula and the Palazzo Contarini. The Palazzo Contarini (also known as Contarini Polignac or dal Zaffo) stands on the Grand Canal, and Monet painted it from across the water during the two weeks he and Alice stayed with Mary Young Hunter at the Palazzo Barbaro. The only other version, in an upright format, is Palazzo Contarini in the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. For the whole trip, see Monet in Venice.

How it was painted

Like all his Venice pictures, Monet began this canvas outdoors, in front of the motif, and then reworked it carefully in his studio at Giverny after his return. The color scheme, a narrow range of greens and violets, is close to the Water Lilies he was painting in the same years, such as Water Lilies (1904), and has reminded some writers of Symbolist painting. The museum points out that only in the Rouen Cathedral series had he paid comparable attention to color on a fixed stone facade; compare Rouen Cathedral, Portal and Tower d'Albane, Midday. Unlike the cathedrals, though, the Venice pictures are in different sizes and are not a series in the strict sense.

Compare the hazy diagonal view of Le Palais Ducal, hung alongside it in Potsdam, and Gondola in Venice in Nantes.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting was shown at Bernheim-Jeune's Venice exhibition in 1912 and in a Durand-Ruel Monet show in 1914, and toured American cities with Durand-Ruel in 1915–16. The New York collector Adolph Lewisohn acquired it in 1917 and lent it to the Metropolitan Museum's Impressionist exhibition of 1921. It stayed with his heirs until 1996, when it was sold at Christie's New York to the dealer David Nahmad, and it was sold again at Sotheby's London in June 2013 to Hasso Plattner. It is now in the Museum Barberini in Potsdam (MB-Mon-31). See where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.