Palazzo Da Mula Morosini

Palazzo Da Mula Morosini, known in French as Le Palais de Mula (Wildenstein 1765), is one of two canvases Claude Monet painted of the Gothic palace on the Grand Canal during his stay in Venice in 1908. This horizontal version, 65 by 92 centimeters, belonged to the Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen; the other, Palazzo da Mula, Venice, is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It is the darker and more nocturnal of the two.

What you're looking at

There is no sky at all. The palace front runs across the full width of the canvas and up beyond the top edge, so the picture is simply a wall of architecture above a band of water. Monet paints the facade in blue-green, slate and violet, with pale vertical strokes for the stone pilasters and pointed Gothic windows as dark lilac shapes. A few warmer touches, rose and pink in the windows of the upper storey, suggest reflected light.

At the water line, two broad arched openings stand dark in the center, and in front of them a black gondola with a rounded cabin lies along the facade. Thin mooring posts rise out of the water to the left. On the right edge, part of the neighboring building, pale and pinkish, catches more light. The canal fills the lower third: horizontal strokes of saturated turquoise and green, with darker blue reflections of the gondola and doorway. The whole picture has the cool, sunk light of late afternoon or evening.

The palace and the trip

The Palazzo Da Mula Morosini is a fifteenth-century Gothic palace on the Grand Canal. Monet came to Venice with his wife Alice in early October 1908, invited by Mary Young Hunter, and stayed until early December, first at the Palazzo Barbaro and then at the Hotel Britannia. He chose a handful of motifs, and the palace fronts on the Grand Canal, painted flat-on from the water, were among the most radical: no perspective, no horizon, a frieze of stone and light.

How this version differs

The Washington canvas shows the same facade in brighter, more silvery light, with paler stone and lighter water. This one is more somber and more unified, almost monochrome in blue and green, and the gondola reads as a single dark accent. The framing also matters: the facade is cropped hard at the top and sides, so that it becomes a pattern of arches and verticals, closer to a woven pattern than to a view. Monet used the same device for Palazzo Contarini and the four Dario pictures, including the Chicago Venice, Palazzo Dario.

How it was painted

The facade and water are laid in short, mostly vertical strokes above and horizontal ones below, with color mixed partly on the canvas. Darks are made from deep blues and violets rather than black. The pale verticals of the pilasters and posts give rhythm to an otherwise dim surface. Monet completed the canvas at Giverny after the trip, like all his Venice pictures; twenty-nine of them were shown at Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1912.

Ownership

The painting belonged to Paul G. Allen (1953–2018) and was lent to the touring exhibition Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection. Allen's collection was sold at Christie's New York in November 2022; the present owner of this canvas is not publicly recorded. To see this motif in a museum, visit the National Gallery of Art in Washington. For the full Venice group see Monet in Venice, and for Monet in public collections, Where to See Monet's Paintings.