Monet and Venice: the story of an obsession

“I came here not for romantic purposes but to work.”

Joseph Brodsky, Watermark

 Monet exclaimed “I will not go to Venice,” which was “too beautiful to be painted,” but he went anyway and painted it obsessively when he got there.  In the autumn of 1908, he was the guest of the English society hostess and art collector Mary Hunter in her Palazzo Barbaro.  After two weeks she left Venice and he moved for a different view to the Grand Hotel Britannia.  He was not interested in architecture, but did see the partially reconstructed lower section of the landmark Campanile (model for the one on the Berkeley campus in California).  On July 14, 1902, when silt had built up and weakened the foundation, loud rumblings warned citizens to scramble to safety and the tall pointed belltower collapsed into the Piazza San Marco.

Apart from his patient gondoliers, Monet had no significant connection to Italians.  Sitting in their long narrow boats enabled him to immerse himself in the atmosphere of the watery palazzi and palatial waters.  In Across the River and into the Trees (1950), Hemingway described their mysterious ambience: “They got down into the dark gondola and there was the same magic, as always, of the light hull, and the sudden displacement that you made, and then the dark privacy.”  Monet’s wife Alice, always seated at his side on land and sea, provided useful ballast in the bobbing gondolas.  She could not control his fanatical work schedule, but reassured and encouraged him, and spent her time writing long letters to her daughter.

Monet had often painted water on the Seine, the Thames, the Atlantic coast of Normandy, and the Mediterranean coast of Bordighera and Antibes.  He knew that the canals of Amsterdam and Stockholm have a northern light and look quite different from those he planned to paint in Venice.  He took nine architectural subjects, and devoted between three and six canvasses to each of them.  In a rigid schedule he painted a series of the same major subjects for two hours at the same time every day, and became furious when stormy autumn weather interrupted him.  On his only visit there, from October 1 to December 7, 1908, Monet painted 37 works, of which 20 appear in the exhibition Monet and Venice (catalogue ed. Melissa Buron and Lisa Small, Rizzoli, 265p, £45/$55), in the de Young Museum, San Francisco, from March 21 to July 26, 2026.

Claude Monet: The Thames below Westminster

“Fixing his sensations,” Monet captured the changing effects of light and shadow, the iridescent interplay of air, water, stone and reflections, the mood and atmosphere in soft pinks, cool blues and deep violets.  Fusing sea and sky, he depicted carpets of cloud and blazing sunsets that flared up behind the luminous buildings.  In his effervescent and palpitating, hazy, floating and insubstantial pictures, all the solid churches and palazzi become liquid stone.  They rise like ghosts out of the calm water and are reflected in the lagoon.  His Palazzo Ducale Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore fades out like an overexposed photo.  For Monet, too much repetition was just enough.  He finished all the paintings at his home in Normandy before exhibiting them in 1912.

The artist’s blurred, out-of-focus style was partly caused by failing eyesight. (Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt were also nearly blind in old age.)  These repetitive theme and variation studies are, however, far less interesting than his paintings of Rouen Cathedral, done at entirely different and contrasting times, which resemble a fascinating series of modern motion pictures.  A 1915 movie in this exhibition shows him painting spontaneously with rapid brush strokes.  His Venetian waterscapes have no architectural details nor people, no human element nor drama, so Venice seems empty and lifeless instead of vivid and exotic.  A single bird adds intense interest in his snowscape The Magpie.

RouenCathedral, Monet, 1894

I found two paintings in this exhibition by other artists more interesting than the works by Monet.  In Canaletto’s picture of the official galley of the Doge of Venice, Bucintoro at the Molo (1715), the sharp details and crystalline topographical clarity of the elaborately decorated barge match the fine architectural details of the Palazzo Ducale.  John Singer Sargent’s An Interior in Venice (1899) expertly portrays four intimate Henry Jamesian-figures illuminated in a dark palatial room.  Like Turner’s Venice—Noon (1845), Monet’s paintings of water and sky blur and dissolve into near abstraction.  James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Gold—St. Mark’s Venice (1880) also captures ephemeral moments and dissolves the basilica into inky blackness.

Nocturne: Blue and Gold – St Mark’s, Venice, James McNeill Whistler, 1880

In The Grand Canal the pink dome of La Salute church and the square palazzi rise beneath a cloudy blue sky and are vaguely reflected in the flowing blue water.  A few tiny gondolas float in the distance, and pali (posts) that moor the gondolas rise on the left, the tallest one touching the top of the frame.  The curved striped pali look like the revolving curved poles that used to advertise barber shops in America.

Claude Monet, Le Grand Canal

The ground floor of the Palazzo Ducale has an arcade, with a loggia on the floor above it, decorated with sculpture and Gothic pinnacles.  Monet’s The Palazzo Ducale is seen across the lagoon from the island of San Giorgio.  The rectangular pink building on the water’s edge of Piazza San Marco has three storeys of arched windows reflected in the shining water.  The tall pillars rising parallel to the left side are topped by the Lion of St. Mark and a statue of San Teodoro.  A guide in the Palazzo Ducale museum once showed me, with a salacious grin, a medieval metal cintura di castità (chastity belt), which secured the husband’s wife and daughter while he was fighting the infidel in the Crusades.

Claude Monet – The Doges Palace (Le Palais ducal)

With very limited things to say about the repetitive and nearly identical paintings of the same scenes, the editors fill up this catalogue with tangential chapters and illustrations, which sometimes wander quite far from Monet.  They include sections on weather patterns and tourism; the meaning of time; the exhibition history of his pictures; depictions of Venice that Monet might have seen in Paris and London; works of other artists who came just before Monet; his predecessors and contemporaries (the last three overlapping); programme music inspired by his work; and air quality.  Another art historian notes that “the air derives its blue color from the corpuscles of humidity which intercept the sun’s rays.”

The design of this catalogue makes it difficult to read the page numbers printed at the bottom and constricted in the tight binding.  The citations of the pictures are printed vertically, so readers must either twist their necks or turn the heavy book around in order to read them.  It would have been far more revealing and interesting to include chapters that discuss films and literature about Venice.  The four best films set in La Serenissima are Death in Venice (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Wings of the Dove (1997) and the handsome television series Commissario Brunetti (2000-2019)—all based on novels.

In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Lord Byron noted that “her structures rise / As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand.”  Marcel Proust called Venice “a painting already executed in nature.”  Henry James’ “The Aspern Papers” (1888) anticipated Monet’s spectral mood: “The great basilica, with its low domes and bristling embroideries, the mystery of its mosaic and sculpture, looked ghostly in the tempered gloom, and the sea-breeze passed between the twin columns of the Piazzetta.”  Thomas Mann’s rapturous account of the city in Death in Venice (1912) described the magical structures that meet the awestruck eye of the visitor: “the airy splendor of the palace and Bridge of Sighs, the columns of lion and saint on the shore, the glory of the projecting flank of the fairy temple, the vista of gateway and clock.”

Canaletto was certainly not, as one contributor to the Monet catalogue claims, “the greatest painter of Venice.”  It’s surprising and disappointing that this catalogue includes 12 pages on Whistler, but ignores Vittore Carpaccio.  This magnificent artist was praised by Chateaubriand, Théophile Gautier, the Goncourt Brothers, John Ruskin and Henry James.  His art has wit and charm, luxurious details and linear perfection, costumed pageantry, dramatic spectacles and ritual solemnity.

In Carpaccio (2005), Peter Humfrey perceptively describes A Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross (c.1496, Venice, Accademia): “In the upper floor loggia on the left, the Patriarch is seen curing a man possessed of a demon by raising the reliquary above the patient’s head.  Witnessing the miracle is a group of confraternity members, dressed in their white ceremonial robes and carrying heavy candlesticks.  They form the head of a long procession stretching down the staircase, along the quay and back across the arched wooden drawbridge,” which rises over the Grand Canal at the Rialto.  Tall chimney pots and laundry hanging from the rooftops provide domestic details.  An animated spectacle takes place at the center of the painting with twelve gondoliers in colorful red jackets and white tights poling expertly through the crowded and solid-looking dark water.

In his later book, Carpaccio (2022), Humfrey explains Fishing and Fowling in the Lagoon (c.1494, Los Angeles, Getty Museum).  Practising a technique that originated in Asia, 17 aristocratic well-dressed archers in caps, belted blouses and tights, propelled by their oarsmen in six long narrow boats, are “catching fish with the use of trained black cormorants.  Once the birds have caught the fish in their gullets, the archers would pellet them with clay balls [or use a snare] to bring them back to the boats, where the cormorants would disgorge their prey.”  At the same time, four of the archers complete their bounty by leaning over to shoot arrows at sitting ducks floating in the still green water.  In the background a V-shaped flock of birds fly through the clouds and over the hills to safety.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Painting and the Novel, Impressionist Quartet, biographies of Wyndham Lewis and Modigliani, and a book on the Canadian realist painter Alex Colville.

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