Twilight, Venice

Twilight, Venice is Claude Monet's view of the island church of San Giorgio Maggiore at sunset, painted on his single visit to Venice in 1908. It is held by the Ishibashi Foundation and shown at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo, the museum formerly known as the Bridgestone Museum of Art. Of all Monet's Venetian pictures it is the most extravagantly colored.

What you're looking at

The church and its campanile stand to the left of center as a single dark shape, almost without detail. The bell tower rises against the sky like a dark spike, the dome and the long low monastery buildings run off to the right, and the whole island sits on a strip of shadow at the water line. Monet makes no attempt to describe Palladio's white facade. Seen against the light, it has become a silhouette in plum and rust.

Everything else is sky and water. At the top a band of turquoise and blue-green fades into yellow, then into a deep orange that burns behind the church and spreads right across the canvas. Low on the right, almost lost in the glare, are faint pinkish forms that may be the domes of the Salute or the buildings of the Giudecca dissolving in haze. The lagoon repeats the sky in horizontal strokes of orange, coral and violet, broken by streaks of blue. Directly under the campanile, a column of dark broken touches runs down the water: the tower's reflection, the one vertical in the lower half.

The signature and date, Claude Monet 1908, sit at the lower right. Close up, the sky is built of short, criss-crossing strokes laid wet over wet, so that orange and blue mix at their edges without turning muddy.

Venice in the autumn of 1908

Monet went to Venice only once. He arrived with his wife Alice at the beginning of October 1908, invited by the American-born hostess Mary Young Hunter, and stayed first at the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal, then at the Hotel Britannia on the Riva degli Schiavoni, leaving in early December. He had long resisted the city, which he thought had been painted too often, but once there he worked steadily. He painted from gondolas, from the water steps of palaces and from the quay, and he chose a small number of motifs: the Doge's Palace, San Giorgio Maggiore, the Grand Canal, a handful of palazzi. San Giorgio, across the basin from his hotel, was the motif he could watch change through the whole day. Here it is seen at the end of it, with the sun going down behind the island to the west.

He brought the canvases back to Giverny unfinished and worked on them for more than three years. Alice died in May 1911, and the Venice pictures were the last work they had shared. Twenty-nine of them were shown at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1912.

A near twin in Cardiff

The composition exists in a second, very similar version, Sunset in Venice in National Museum Cardiff, which the Welsh collector Gwendoline Davies bought in 1912. The two share the placing of the church, the reflected tower and the orange sky. The Tokyo picture is the brighter and more broken of the two: its blues at the top are stronger, its oranges hotter, and the water carries more cool violet. Compare too the daytime views of the same island, such as The Church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Indianapolis and San Giorgio Maggiore in Cardiff, where the church is pale and solid. Set side by side, they show what a series meant for Monet: one building, and the light doing all the work.

How it was painted

The method is the late series method. Monet worked on several canvases at once, each for a particular hour, and returned to them at the same time each day. Back in his studio he unified the surfaces, adding the dense, woven layers of color that make the sky here look almost textile. The silhouette is not black at all but a mixture of deep red, violet and blue, which keeps it from punching a hole in the picture. The reflected campanile is painted with the same broken touch as the water around it, so it reads as light on moving water rather than as a solid shadow.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to the Ishibashi Foundation, founded by Shojiro Ishibashi of the Bridgestone tire company, and is shown at the Artizon Museum in central Tokyo. It has been included in recent collection displays such as Chasing the Horizon (2022). For the whole group, see Monet in Venice; for other places to see Monet worldwide, see Where to See Monet's Paintings.