The Rio della Salute

What you are looking at

We are low on the water, looking down a narrow side canal. On the left a tall palace rises in sunlight, its walls warm orange, coral and rose, with two white stone balconies stacked one above the other and a deep blue shadow under the loggia at the top. A pinkish house wall closes the far left edge. Ahead, the canal turns under a low, pale stone bridge, and a gondola, a dark shape, slides beneath it. Beyond the bridge the buildings recede in cooler yellows, greens and blues. On the right a sheer wall in yellow and pink climbs the whole height of the canvas, topped by the dark green crown of a tree that spills over into a clear blue sky.

The water in the foreground is a mirror of all this, broken into reflections of orange, violet and green. Everything is bathed in the glistening, warm light of a Venetian afternoon, and the color is among the strongest of all Monet's Venice pictures.

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

Venice, autumn 1908

Claude Monet spent ten weeks in Venice in the autumn and early winter of 1908. The Rio della Salute is a small canal named after the Baroque church of Santa Maria della Salute nearby. Monet had a gondolier row him to the same spot on the water again and again, always at the same time of day, a routine he kept throughout the Venice campaign. He painted this motif three times. Like his London views, the Venice pictures treat the city as a landscape of water, what Monet called paysages d'eau, and in his letters he praised the city's unique light.

Venice was Monet's last journey abroad. He finished the canvases at Giverny and showed twenty-nine of them at Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1912. See Monet in Venice.

How it was painted

The Barberini notes that the buildings sit under a diffuse haze while certain details, the window frames and balconies, are drawn more sharply. Monet lays the sunlit walls in broad, vertical strokes of orange and pink over a cooler underlayer, and picks out the balustrades in quick white dashes. The bridge is a single curved band. In the water he uses short, horizontal touches to break up the reflections, and the far end of the canal, at right, almost dissolves; the apse of the church of San Gregorio can just be made out there.

How this version differs

Of the three Rio della Salute canvases, this is the sunniest and most saturated, with a strong blue sky and walls glowing orange. The privately owned Rio della Salute (W 1761) uses the same composition in cooler violet and green under a white, overcast sky. The Pola Museum's Rio della Salute is taller and narrower and bathes everything in a red-orange glow. For other narrow-canal and palace views from the same trip, see Palazzo da Mula and Palazzo Contarini.

Looking closely

The gondola under the bridge is little more than a dark curving stroke, but it gives the picture scale and a sense of movement. Above, the tree spilling over the wall at the top right is painted in thick dabs of dark green and blue, the darkest mass in the picture, set against the strongest blue of the sky.

Ownership and where to see it

Catalogued as Wildenstein 1762, the painting was first offered by the Paris dealers Bernheim-Jeune and Durand-Ruel in 1912. It then passed through a Paris sale in 1954, dealers and collectors in London and New York, and several auctions before being in the Nahmad Collection in 2012. Hasso Plattner, the co-founder of SAP, bought it in 2013 (inventory MB-Mon-30). It is shown at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, which displays one of the largest groups of Monets outside France. See our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.