The Doge's Palace Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore (Zürich)

The Doge's Palace Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore (Le Palais Ducal vu de Saint-Georges Majeur) is one of six views Claude Monet painted in 1908 from the island of San Giorgio, looking across the lagoon to the Doge's Palace. This version, 65 by 100 centimeters and signed Claude Monet 1908 at the lower right in blue, is in the Kunsthaus Zürich (1995/0004). It is the haziest of the six.

What you're looking at

The scene is the same as in its siblings: a dark band of quay in the foreground, a wide stretch of lagoon, and the waterfront of Venice running across the horizon with the Doge's Palace at its center. But here the light has almost eaten the architecture. The palace is a pale block of cream and apricot, its windows barely indicated by faint blue marks. The Campanile at the far left is a ghostly column of pink. The buildings on either side, the Library to the left and the long Riva to the right, are no more than slightly denser patches of light.

The sky is a luminous veil of cream, pale yellow and lilac, nearly the same value as the buildings. The lagoon picks up the same colors in fine horizontal strokes: cream, lemon, pink, and pale blue-green, brightest in the middle distance where the sun strikes the water. At the bottom, the quay of San Giorgio is a diagonal band of soft lavender-blue, much lighter than the near-black edge in some versions.

The effect is of morning mist, or of sunlight diffused through haze off the water, the condition Monet had pursued in London a few years earlier.

The six views

According to the Kunsthaus, Monet painted six closely related canvases of the Doge's Palace, the Campanile (then being rebuilt after its collapse in 1902) and the Riva degli Schiavoni, all from San Giorgio Maggiore, and completed them at Giverny. The Metropolitan Museum's canvas is pinker and more defined; the Guggenheim's is cool and silvery, with a strong dark foreground. The Zürich picture pushes furthest toward dissolution: there is almost no contrast anywhere, and the city becomes a horizontal line of warm light between two expanses of shimmer. In the close-up Doge's Palace in Brooklyn, by contrast, the same facade fills the canvas.

Where and when

Monet and his wife Alice were in Venice from early October to early December 1908, staying first at the Palazzo Barbaro and then at the Hotel Britannia. He worked on canvases in rotation, each at its own hour. San Giorgio Maggiore, on its island across the basin, gave him both a motif, the church itself, and a viewpoint back toward the city. Twenty-nine Venice canvases were shown at Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1912.

How it was painted

The surface is evenly covered in small, dry strokes, the paint dragged so that colors overlap without blending. Monet keeps nearly everything in a narrow band of high values, separating forms by temperature, warm buildings against cool water, rather than by light and dark. The foreground quay is painted more broadly, with diagonal strokes.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting passed through the hands of Paul Durand-Ruel. It later belonged to the Zürich businessman Walter Haefner, who owned it by 1965 and lent it to the Kunsthaus from 1974. He gave it to the museum in 1995 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his company, AMAG. It hangs in the Kunsthaus's collection of French painting. For the full Venice group see Monet in Venice; for other public collections of Monet, see Where to See Monet's Paintings.