The Grand Canal in Venice

What you are looking at

A row of wooden mooring poles stands in the water in the foreground: one tall and dark, almost black-violet, just left of center, running off the top of the canvas; others leaning at different angles to the left, striped rust, gold and blue. Behind them, across the Grand Canal, the domes of the church of Santa Maria della Salute rise in soft pink and lavender, the large dome and the smaller one beside it, with the cupola and statues of the Dogana and the buildings to the right dissolving into a warm, violet-gold haze. At far left, in the distance, a few gondolas and the shapes of more poles are just visible.

The water fills the lower third of the picture, a field of short, broken horizontal strokes of blue, green, mauve and gold, into which the reflections of the poles wriggle down. The sky is a hazy mix of lilac, rose and grey. Monet signed and dated the canvas at lower right.

Claude Monet painted the view in Venice in the autumn of 1908. This canvas measures 73.7 by 92.4 centimeters, is number 1738 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Where and when

Monet went to Venice only once, from early October to early December 1908, at the age of 68, with his wife Alice. They stayed first at the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal, as guests of the American hostess Ariana Curtis, and then at the Grand Hotel Britannia. The Barbaro, owned by the Boston-born Curtis family, had earlier welcomed Henry James and John Singer Sargent.

Monet had long resisted the trip, saying Venice was too beautiful to be painted. Once there, he worked steadily, beginning more than thirty canvases that he finished at Giverny. Twenty-nine were shown at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in 1912, a year after Alice's death. See Monet in Venice.

The view looks down the Grand Canal toward the Salute and is usually said to have been painted from the water steps of the Palazzo Barbaro, a short way up the canal, so that the poles stand between the painter and the church. Monet painted the motif several times; another version is in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

How it was painted

The poles are the key. Their verticals set a rhythm that holds the picture together, and their dark color pushes the domes back into the haze. Monet makes the most solid building in Venice, a Baroque church of white Istrian stone, look like a cloud. Look at the large dome: its outline is soft, built from short curving strokes of pink and violet, with a single warm highlight on its left side.

The water is as carefully painted as anything in the picture. Each stroke is a separate color, laid side by side, and the reflections of the poles are zigzags that break apart as the water moves. Notice the color harmony: almost everything is a variation of violet, rose, blue and gold, with no strong contrasts of light and dark except the tall central pole. Monet was painting the Venetian atmosphere, not the city's architecture, the same approach he had taken in London a few years before.

The motif and its siblings

The Grand Canal and the Salute are one of several Venetian motifs Monet painted in series in 1908. The Doge's Palace appears in The Palazzo Ducale Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore and Le Palais ducal; the Gothic façade of Palazzo Contarini rises straight from the water; and San Giorgio Maggiore glows at dusk in Sunset in Venice in Cardiff. Compare too the hazy Thames views of the Houses of Parliament series.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has one of the largest Monet collections outside France: see Monet at the MFA Boston. For the artist's life and later work, see Claude Monet.