The Palazzo Dario

The Palazzo Dario is Claude Monet's upright view of the leaning, marble-faced palace on the Grand Canal, painted in Venice in 1908. At 92 by 73 centimeters it is the tallest of his four Palazzo Dario canvases, and it is in National Museum Cardiff (Amgueddfa Cymru), inventory NMW A 2481, one of the Monets collected by the Davies sisters of Gregynog.

What you're looking at

The upright format changes the picture. The palace still faces us flat across the canal, but now the water fills the whole lower half, a wide sheet of pale turquoise, mint and pink laid in rippling horizontal strokes. The facade sits above it like a screen: three storeys of arched windows in violet and blue, the round inlaid discs as rosettes of pink and lilac, and at water level a dark arched doorway with a gondola moored before it, its cabin a dark dome.

On the left, the neighboring Gothic palace with pointed windows glows a warm pink. On the right, a building in shadow is painted in cool greens and blues, and a narrow slit of very pale sky opens between. The signature and date, Claude Monet 1908, are at the lower left, small and blue.

Compared with the other versions, the color is soft and high in key. The facade is pale pinkish-cream rather than gold, the water pastel rather than deep green. It is the Dario as a morning or overcast picture, with little contrast and no strong sun.

The palace and the visit

The Palazzo Dario, on the Dorsoduro side of the Grand Canal, was built in the late fifteenth century for Giovanni Dario and is known for its colored marble cladding and porphyry discs, and for its lean. It stands almost opposite the Palazzo Barbaro, where Monet and his wife Alice first stayed when they arrived in October 1908 as guests of Mary Young Hunter; they later moved to the Hotel Britannia and left in early December. Monet painted the palace from the water, working on several canvases in rotation.

How this version differs

Monet painted four views of the palace (W. 1757–1760). The Chicago Venice, Palazzo Dario is horizontal and cooler, with a turquoise canal. The Palazzo Dario sold at Sotheby's in 2007 shares Cardiff's tall proportions but is darker and warmer, with olive water and gold reflections. The smallest, Le Palais Dario, is the most intense, with a stripe of yellow sunlight on the right. Cardiff's canvas is the gentlest of the four and gives the water the most room: half the picture is reflection, so the palace seems to stand on its own image.

How it was painted

The water is the most worked part of the canvas: short horizontal strokes of turquoise, green and pink, closer and finer toward the bottom edge, with longer vertical smears where the facade is reflected. The facade is drier and more broken, the windows indicated by soft violet patches rather than drawn. As with all the Venice pictures, Monet reworked the canvas at Giverny before it left his studio.

Ownership and where to see it

The Davies sisters, Gwendoline and Margaret, bought Impressionist paintings in the years before and after the First World War and left their collections to the National Museum of Wales; Gwendoline's came in 1951 and Margaret's in 1963. Cardiff now holds three of Monet's Venice canvases: this one, San Giorgio Maggiore and Sunset in Venice, as well as water-lily paintings including Waterlilies of 1906. For the Venice group as a whole see Monet in Venice, and for other public Monet collections, Where to See Monet's Paintings.