The Rio della Salute

What you are looking at

The view is the same as in Monet's other Rio della Salute pictures: from a gondola low on the water, looking down a narrow canal. On the left a tall palace rises with stacked white balconies, green shutters and a dark blue loggia at the top. Ahead, a low stone bridge spans the canal, with dark shapes of boats beneath it, and the buildings beyond step back in green-gray. On the right a high wall climbs the full height of the canvas, crowned by the dark, rounded mass of a tree.

What changes is the weather. Here the sky is white and cloudy, with only a hint of yellow light, and the whole picture is cool. The palace is painted in violet, mauve and rose rather than orange; the far buildings are a soft gray-green; the water is a mixture of lilac, green and pale blue. Only a few warm touches, a band of orange on the palace and some red flecks in the water, recall the sun of the other versions.

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

Venice, 1908

Claude Monet arrived in Venice in October 1908 with his wife, Alice, and stayed until December. On the Rio della Salute, the small canal beside Santa Maria della Salute, he had himself rowed to the same position on several days and painted the motif three times, each canvas assigned to a different light. Back at Giverny he reworked the Venice pictures for years. Twenty-nine of them were shown at Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1912. See Monet in Venice.

How it was painted

Monet keeps the brushwork open and varied. The palace walls are built in loose, overlapping strokes of violet and pink; the balconies are quick white lines; the tree is a mass of dark green dabs, almost black against the pale sky. The water is laid in horizontal and diagonal touches that break the reflections into fragments. The overcast light lets him explore close harmonies, violet against green, rose against gray, rather than the strong orange-and-blue contrasts of the sunny version.

How this version differs

Set beside the Museum Barberini's The Rio della Salute, which glows with orange walls under a blue sky, this canvas is its cool twin: same size, same composition, but a gray day instead of afternoon sun. The Pola Museum's Rio della Salute is taller and suffused with red-orange. Together the three show Monet's series method applied to a single Venetian corner. For a view out on the Grand Canal itself, compare The Grand Canal, Venice.

Looking closely

The red flecks scattered across the water and the palace wall are worth seeking out. They are tiny touches of warm color in an otherwise cool picture, and they keep the violet and green from turning cold. At the top right, the tree is a heavy mass of dark green dabs set against the white sky.

Ownership and where to see it

Catalogued as Wildenstein 1761, the painting was handled in 1912 by Bernheim-Jeune and Durand-Ruel and soon went to Ellen H. Henderson of New Orleans. It later passed through several American collections, including that of Stanford Z. Rothschild Jr. of Baltimore from 1972. After his foundation consigned it, it sold at auction in New York in November 2017 for about $8.2 million to a private collector. It is not on public view. See our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.