The Doge's Palace (Le Palais ducal)

The Doge's Palace (Le Palais ducal) is Claude Monet's close, sunlit view of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, painted from the water during his visit in 1908. At 81.3 by 99.1 centimeters it is one of the largest of his Venice canvases, and it has been in the Brooklyn Museum since 1920 (gift of A. Augustus Healy, 20.634). It was the centerpiece of the museum's Monet and Venice exhibition in 2025–26.

What you're looking at

The palace spans almost the full width of the canvas, seen nearly head-on from a boat on the basin of San Marco. Its famous form is all there in shorthand: the two arcaded storeys at the bottom, the loggia's pointed arches painted as a row of violet shadows, and above them the great wall of patterned pink-and-white stone, here rendered as luminous cream, pierced by a row of large arched windows in violet-blue. The crenellated roofline is a band of small white touches against the sky.

At the far left stands one of the granite columns of the Piazzetta, a pale vertical with a darker capital, cutting into the facade. At the right, across the narrow canal behind the palace, the long white bulk of the prison building recedes in blue shadow. The sky is a deep lavender-blue, unusually clear for Monet's Venice.

The water is where the picture comes alive. Directly below the palace, the reflection is a broad band of gold, yellow and cream, broken into horizontal dashes; on either side the canal turns to deep blue, violet and green. The strokes are thick and choppy, suggesting a light breeze on the lagoon. The signature and date, Claude Monet 1908, are at the lower right.

Venice, autumn 1908

Monet arrived in Venice with his wife Alice in early October 1908, as guests of Mary Young Hunter at the Palazzo Barbaro, and later moved to the Hotel Britannia on the Riva degli Schiavoni, a short walk from the palace. They left in early December. The Brooklyn Museum's label notes that Monet painted this canvas from a gondola on the water. He returned to the Doge's Palace more than any other building except San Giorgio, painting it both close up, as here, and from across the basin.

How this version differs

Two other canvases show the palace at this close range, including Le Palais Ducal in the Hasso Plattner Collection at the Museum Barberini, a golden, hazier picture. A third view of this kind set a record for a Monet Venice painting when it sold at Sotheby's London in 2019. Brooklyn's is the clearest and most sharply lit of the group: blue sky, crisp violet shadows in the arcades, and a strong central shaft of reflected sunlight. The distant views, such as The Palazzo Ducale Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore at the Met and the Guggenheim canvas, shrink the same building to a pink band on the horizon.

How it was painted

Monet constructed the facade in thick, broken strokes of cream, pale yellow and lilac, letting the paint itself suggest the diamond pattern of the stonework rather than drawing it. The arcade is a rhythm of blue-violet daubs; the column at left is one long stroke. The water is the most impasted area, with yellow and cream laid over blue in short horizontal touches. As with all the Venice pictures, he reworked the canvas at Giverny before it left his studio, and twenty-nine Venice paintings were exhibited at Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1912.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Brooklyn Museum's European art galleries. In the autumn of 2025 Brooklyn organized Monet and Venice (October 11, 2025–February 1, 2026), with this canvas at its center, before the show traveled to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 2026. For the full Venice group see Monet in Venice, and for other museums with Monet, Where to See Monet's Paintings.