San Giorgio Maggiore

San Giorgio Maggiore is one of Claude Monet's views of the island church across the Venetian lagoon, painted during his only stay in Venice in the autumn of 1908. The canvas, 59.2 by 81.2 centimeters, was bought by Gwendoline Davies in 1912 and is now in National Museum Cardiff (Amgueddfa Cymru), inventory NMW A 2488. Among the San Giorgio pictures it is the palest and most veiled.

What you're looking at

The church sits in the upper middle of the canvas, set well back, with water filling more than half the picture. You can make out the essentials of Palladio's building: the white temple front with its columns and pediment, the dome behind, the tall campanile to the left, and the long low monastery wings to either side, touched with pink and apricot. But everything is softened, as if seen through gauze. The sky is a pale mixture of lilac, rose, green and cream, and the bell tower barely separates from it.

The lagoon is painted in short horizontal strokes of the same colors, lilac and pale green with flecks of pink. Two gondolas are the only dark notes: a small one to the left near a faint sail or mooring post, and a larger one at the right with a standing gondolier, drawn in a few strokes of blue-black. They give scale to the empty water and pull the eye across the canvas. The signature and date, Claude Monet 1908, are at the lower right.

The museum's catalogue notes that the view was taken from the window of the Monets' room at the Hotel Britannia, which faced San Giorgio across the basin of San Marco.

Venice in 1908

Monet arrived in Venice with his wife Alice at the beginning of October 1908 and stayed until early December, first at the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal and then at the Hotel Britannia. He had resisted the city for years, but there he settled into a regular routine of motifs, working on several canvases at once and returning to each at its own hour. From the hotel, San Giorgio was always in front of him, and it became the subject of his longest run of Venetian pictures.

He took the canvases home unfinished and reworked them at Giverny. Alice died in 1911; the following year twenty-nine Venice paintings were shown at Bernheim-Jeune in Paris.

How this version differs

The San Giorgio views divide by hour and weather. At dusk, in Twilight, Venice and Cardiff's own Sunset in Venice, the church is a dark silhouette on an orange sky. In the Indianapolis Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, seen from a similar distance, the facade is brighter and firmer, catching sun, with blue and pink water. This Cardiff canvas is the misty, high-key version: the contrasts are low, the building is almost the same value as the sky, and the gondolas carry the only real darks. It is the picture in the series closest to the London fog paintings Monet had made a few years earlier.

Its smaller size also stands out. Many of the Venice canvases are around 65 by 92 or 73 by 92 centimeters; this one is a little smaller and the brushwork is correspondingly finer.

How it was painted

The paint is thin to medium, with dry, short strokes in the sky that let the pale ground glimmer through. The architecture is not drawn in line but built from slightly lighter and warmer touches laid over the mist: a few vertical strokes of white for the columns, a curve of pink for the dome. The water is laid in horizontal dashes with lilac over green, and a warmer strip of pink along the base of the island suggests the reflection of the buildings.

Ownership and where to see it

Gwendoline Davies (1882–1951), who with her sister Margaret formed the great collection of Impressionist paintings at Gregynog in mid-Wales, bought this canvas in Paris in 1912, the year of the Venice exhibition. It came to the National Museum with her bequest, alongside Sunset in Venice and The Palazzo Dario, so that Cardiff holds three of the Venice pictures. For the whole group see Monet in Venice, and for other public collections of Monet see Where to See Monet's Paintings.