Venice, Palazzo Dario

Venice, Palazzo Dario is one of four canvases Claude Monet painted of the Palazzo Dario on the Grand Canal during his stay in Venice in 1908. This horizontal version, 66.2 by 81.8 centimeters and inscribed Claude Monet 1908 at lower left, is in the Art Institute of Chicago (Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection, 1933.446). It is the coolest and most open of the four.

What you're looking at

The palace fills the center of the canvas, seen straight on from the water. Its pale cream facade is divided into storeys of arched windows, painted as violet and blue slots, and dotted with the palace's famous marble roundels, which Monet gives as small rosettes of lilac and rose. The top-right roundel is a larger, sunburst-like disc. At water level, the central doorway is a dark arch, and a gondola with its black cabin lies moored in front of it.

On the left, a taller pinkish Gothic palace with pointed windows crowds in; on the right, a building in deep green shadow cuts down the edge, and a narrow strip of pale sky shows above it. Everything below the water line, roughly the lower third, is the canal: horizontal strokes of turquoise, mint green and lilac, with long pale reflections of the facade.

The Art Institute's label stresses that Monet painted the marble buildings in the same way as the water, so that the solid forms seem to float in the haze. Look at the facade's surface: it is built from the same short, broken strokes as the canal, and the edges of the windows never harden into lines.

The palace and the trip

The Palazzo Dario, on the Dorsoduro side of the Grand Canal, was built in the late fifteenth century for Giovanni Dario, a secretary of the Venetian Senate. Its narrow facade is faced in colored marble and set with round discs of porphyry and serpentine, and the whole building leans perceptibly. It stands almost opposite the Palazzo Barbaro, where the Monets first stayed. Monet spent about ten weeks in Venice, from early October to early December 1908, with his wife Alice. Invited by the American-born hostess Mary Young Hunter, they stayed first at the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal and then at the Hotel Britannia. Monet worked from the water, setting up in a gondola or on a landing, and on several canvases at once. He had long refused to paint Venice, fearing he would produce only souvenirs, but the palace facades, flat and close, let him do something new: architecture with no sky and no perspective, almost a pattern on a wall of light.

Four versions of the Palazzo Dario

Monet's four Dario canvases (W. 1757–1760) share the frontal view and the gondola, and differ in format and color. Chicago's is horizontal and cool, with blue-green water. The upright canvas in Cardiff, The Palazzo Dario, gives more space to pale pink-and-turquoise water below. The Palazzo Dario that sold at Sotheby's in 2007 is warmer and darker, with olive and gold reflections, and the small Le Palais Dario is the most saturated, with a shaft of yellow sunlight at the right. For other palace fronts from the same weeks, see Palazzo Contarini and Palazzo da Mula.

How it was painted

The surface is dense and evenly worked, with no bare canvas showing. Monet modulates the facade from cream to pink to pale green, so it takes on the color of the reflected water below. The roundels are touched in with a loaded brush, the only raised, jewel-like accents in the picture. He finished the canvas at Giverny over the following years, harmonizing the colors across the whole surface.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting stayed with Monet until April 1912, when he sold it in half-shares to Bernheim-Jeune and Durand-Ruel; it was shown that summer in the Venise exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune as Le Palais Dario. Durand-Ruel sold it in New York at the end of 1912 to Arthur B. Emmons of Newport, who returned it the next year. It later belonged to Annie Swan Coburn of Chicago, whose bequest brought it to the Art Institute in 1933. For other Monet works there, see Monet at the Art Institute of Chicago, and for the full group, Monet in Venice.