The Grand Canal, Venice

What you are looking at

Across the Grand Canal, the great domes of Santa Maria della Salute swell up on the right, their curves modeled in lilac, white and blue, with the smaller dome and the twin bell towers stepping down beside them. Below and to the right, the buildings along the water are blocks of cream and violet over a dark green base where the walls meet the canal. In the foreground at left stand the mooring poles, the pali of Venetian palaces, one thick post running straight from bottom to top of the canvas and a scatter of thinner ones receding toward the open lagoon. A gondola is faintly visible among them.

The water takes up the lower third, a shimmering pavement of short strokes in jade, turquoise, violet and pink. The sky is a pale, greenish blue. Compared with Monet's palest Venice canvases, this one has more weight: the domes are solid, the shadows on the buildings are strong green and violet, and the poles are dark and earthy rather than candy-striped.

The signature and date, Claude Monet 1908, are at lower right.

Venice, 1908

Claude Monet spent ten weeks in Venice in the autumn of 1908, his only visit, with his wife, Alice. Their first lodging was the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal, and from near its water steps Monet looked across to the Salute. He painted this view several times at a fixed hour, changing canvases as the light changed, and took the pictures home to Giverny to finish. Twenty-nine Venice canvases were exhibited at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in 1912, the year after Alice's death. See Monet in Venice.

How it was painted

The canvas is a standard landscape size, about 73 by 92 centimeters. Monet builds the water from horizontal dashes of broken color laid side by side, so the eye mixes them into a single shimmering surface. The architecture is more firmly drawn than in many of the Venice pictures, with clear contours around the domes and the pale lantern on top. The poles are painted last, in long, loaded strokes of brown, violet and green, and they sit firmly in front of everything else.

How this version differs

Monet's half-dozen views of the Salute across the canal range from almost white to deep blue. The San Francisco The Grand Canal, Venice is the most vaporous, a pastel haze of pink and lilac. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's The Grand Canal in Venice is bluer and more somber. This canvas sits between them, the most strongly colored and modeled, with green water and solid domes, so it reads as a clearer, brighter day. It also gives more room to the thin poles at the left, which open a view out to the lagoon.

Looking closely

The water is the richest passage of the canvas: horizontal dashes of jade, turquoise, violet and pink, laid side by side and repeated across the width of the picture. The reflection of the tall pole is a dark, wavering line that breaks up as it descends. Near the left edge, a gondola and a distant white figure on the lagoon are barely indicated.

Ownership and where to see it

Catalogued as Wildenstein 1739, the painting was first sold in 1912 to the dealers Bernheim-Jeune and Durand-Ruel. From 2006 to 2014 it hung on loan at the National Gallery in London. Sotheby's sold it in London on February 3, 2015, for about £23.7 million, then one of the highest prices for a Monet at auction, and it has since been associated with the Nahmad Collection. It is not on regular public view. See our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.