The Palazzo Ducale Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore

What you are looking at

Across a wide stretch of rippling blue water, the Doge's Palace glows in the afternoon light. Its long façade, with the open arcades below and the pink-and-white patterned wall above, is reduced to a soft block of rose and cream, flecked with darker touches for the windows. To its left, the slender campanile of St. Mark's rises out of a haze of pink and gold; to the right, the buildings of the Riva degli Schiavoni run away in a low line of pale facades toward the edge of the canvas. Above it all, the sky is a veil of pale turquoise, lilac and yellow, painted in small, broken strokes that merge with the vapor rising from the lagoon.

The water fills almost half the picture. It is built from thousands of short horizontal dabs of blue, violet, green and pink, so that it shimmers and seems to move. Across the bottom of the canvas runs a dark, flat band of deep blue-violet: the edge of the stone quay of San Giorgio Maggiore, where Monet set up his easel. This dark wedge in the foreground pushes the palace back and makes the light across the water look even brighter. Monet signed and dated the canvas at lower right.

Monet is not describing Venice's famous Gothic architecture in detail. He is painting the light that wraps it: what he called the enveloppe, the atmosphere between him and his subject, which in Venice is thick with moisture and reflected color.

How Monet painted it

Monet came to Venice for the first time in October 1908, at the age of sixty-eight, with his wife Alice. They stayed first at the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal as guests of an American friend of John Singer Sargent, and then at the Hotel Britannia. He had resisted the trip for years, believing Venice too beautiful and too often painted to be painted again, but once there he worked intensely until early December.

Each day he followed a strict schedule, moving between motifs as the light changed. According to Alice's letters, he set up on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in the morning to paint the view across the Bacino di San Marco to the Doge's Palace. Of this particular view, six versions are known, catalogued by Daniel Wildenstein as W1751–1756. Besides the Met's canvas, versions are in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Brooklyn Museum and private collections. Monet took the canvases home unfinished and worked on them at Giverny for several years.

The six versions are close in composition but were painted under different weather and at different moments, so the colors of the palace, the sky and the lagoon shift from one canvas to the next, cooler in some and warmer in others. Seen together, they work like the Rouen Cathedral façades of the 1890s: one fixed building used as a screen on which to record changing light. That serial logic is why the Venice pictures should be judged as a group as much as individually.

San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk: a related view

From the opposite direction, looking from the Doge's Palace side toward the island, Monet painted the church of San Giorgio Maggiore itself, most famously in San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk (1908–12), now in the National Museum Cardiff. That painting, catalogued here as Sunset in Venice, shows the church's dark silhouette against a blazing orange and blue sky. The Met's picture is its counterpart: the view Monet saw when he turned around on San Giorgio and looked back toward St. Mark's.

Meaning and context

The Venice paintings were Monet's last major campaign away from Giverny. After 1908 he rarely traveled, concentrating on his water garden and the vast Water Lilies. Alice fell ill soon after their return and died in May 1911, and the long work of finishing the Venice canvases at Giverny was overshadowed by grief. When twenty-nine Venice canvases were finally shown at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in May–June 1912, they were acclaimed. The painter Paul Signac wrote to Monet that he considered them the highest expression of his art.

Critics have long read the series as a meeting between Monet's late, dissolving style and the city that had inspired Turner, Canaletto and Whistler. In Monet's Venice, stone becomes light and the city seems to float.

Where to see it

This version belongs to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. McVeigh in 1959; it is not always on view. For other Venice paintings in our catalogue, see The Grand Canal in Venice, Palazzo Contarini and Gondola in Venice.