Sunset in Venice

Sunset in Venice, better known in museum catalogues as San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk or San Giorgio Maggiore, Twilight, is one of the paintings Claude Monet began during his only visit to Venice, in the autumn of 1908, and completed at Giverny over the following years. It shows the island church of San Giorgio Maggiore, with its tall campanile, as a dark silhouette against a blazing sky, its reflection running down into the lagoon. The canvas (65.2 × 92.4 cm) belongs to Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales and hangs in National Museum Cardiff.

What you're looking at

The composition is almost absurdly simple. A low, dark mass of buildings sits on the left, crowned by the needle of the bell tower and the dome of Palladio's church. Everything else is sky and water, divided by a horizon that dissolves into haze at the right, where the domes of Santa Maria della Salute and the mouth of the Grand Canal are only faintly suggested.

The sky is a gradient of color laid down in short, woven strokes: deep blue at the top, then green, then a broad band of orange and gold around the sun, which itself is never shown. The water repeats the sky in a slightly duller key, so the picture is nearly symmetrical about the horizon. The single strong vertical, the campanile, is doubled by its reflection, a dark, broken column of blue and violet that wobbles down to the bottom edge.

Look closely at the silhouette. It is not black. Monet builds it from purples, deep reds and blue-greens, which is why the island seems to glow faintly from within rather than being cut out of the sky. The architecture is barely drawn; the forms are true enough to be recognized, but they read as color first and buildings second.

Monet in Venice

Monet arrived in Venice with his second wife, Alice, at the beginning of October 1908. They stayed first at the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal at the invitation of an English acquaintance, then moved to the Hotel Britannia, remaining until early December. Monet, then 68, had resisted the city for years, partly because so many painters, from Canaletto and Turner to his own contemporaries, had already painted it. Once there, he worked steadily, choosing a handful of motifs and painting them at fixed times of day: the Doge's Palace, the Palazzo Contarini and Palazzo Dario, the Grand Canal and San Giorgio Maggiore.

The dusk view of San Giorgio appears to have been painted from the waterfront near the Riva degli Schiavoni, looking across the basin toward the island. Monet painted the church under several different conditions; this is the most dramatic of them.

Completing the series in France

Monet left Venice with many canvases unfinished and worked on them at Giverny for several years. The death of Alice in May 1911 interrupted, then seems to have spurred, their completion. Twenty-nine Venetian paintings were exhibited at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1912 under the title Claude Monet: Venise, and the show was a commercial success.

The Welsh collector Gwendoline Davies bought this canvas in 1912, directly from that exhibition. She and her sister Margaret assembled one of Britain's great collections of Impressionism, and Gwendoline bequeathed this painting to the National Museum of Wales in 1952. A second, closely related version is in the Artizon Museum (formerly the Bridgestone Museum of Art) in Tokyo.

Meaning

Monet's Venice paintings carry on the project of his series of the 1890s, the haystacks, poplars and Rouen Cathedral, in which a single motif is studied under changing light. In Venice, though, the weight shifts from analysis to mood. Monet called the Venetian sunsets "unique in the world," and this picture is close to pure atmosphere: architecture held in suspension between a burning sky and its reflection.

It also looks back. A low silhouette against a flaming sky over water recalls Monet's own Impression, Sunrise of 1872, and the subject inevitably invites comparison with J. M. W. Turner, whose luminous paintings of Venice and of the Thames Monet knew well.

In popular culture

The painting reached a wide audience in 1999, when a version of it appeared in the heist film The Thomas Crown Affair, stolen from a fictionalized Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met does not own it, though it does have a related Venetian Monet, The Doge's Palace Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore.

Related works

See also The Palazzo Ducale Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore, The Grand Canal in Venice, Palazzo Contarini and Gondola in Venice, and the wider survey in Famous Monet Paintings.

Where to see it

National Museum Cardiff, Cathays Park, Cardiff, Wales (NMW A 2485), where it is normally on display in the Impressionist galleries alongside other works from the Davies sisters' collection. Admission is free. The painting is in the public domain.