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Claude Monet was 68 years old before he ever set foot in Venice, surprisingly keeping his distance from a city that for hundreds of years has attracted many of Europe’s best painters. When Monet finally did get there, he created dozens of paintings and the French impressionist’s Venetian works are now the subject of a show at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, simply titled Monet and Venice.
“It might have been insecurity, because Venice had been painted so famously and by so many major names in western history,” said the de Young’s Melissa Buron, who co-curated the show with Lisa Small. As she explained, given Venice’s artistic pedigree, even a master such as Monet would have reason to feel intimidated by the location.
In addition to collecting two dozen of the Frenchman’s works in Venice, the show also offers Venetian paintings from other greats – including James McNeill Whistler, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, John Singer Sargent, JMW Turner and Paul Signac. The show is rounded out by a number of Monet’s early pieces and some late waterlilies, packing in more than 100 works overall. The result is an entrancing, airy afternoon holiday filled with much to seduce the eye.
Although from the outside it would seem a slam dunk to pair Monet and Venice, the truth is that the world might have never known what the storied city of water and bridges looked like through the great impressionist’s eyes. Monet’s visit to Venice had originally been scheduled for a scant two weeks – hardly enough time for the paint to dry – but he extended his stay to two months, letting him create dozens of oils.
“We wanted to emphasize in the exhibition that his trip to Venice was not predestined,” said Buron. “I originally thought ‘he’s an artist of water and light, of course he would go to Venice,’ but it really almost never happened.”
According to Buron, when Monet and his wife Alice arrived at Venice, the artist was able to fit in to the community of like-minded souls painting the canal-rich city’s most storied sights. Although Monet would have been recognizable to some as a successful painter, the couple was mostly able to blend in among the other tourists. “It was sort of like a second honeymoon for them to be able to have this experience in their twilight years,” said Buron.
Monet was friends with Whistler, Sargent, Renoir and Signac, and so was familiar with at least some of their Venice work. While in London sitting out the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, he would have seen Turner’s Venice works in the National Gallery, and he even purchased one of Signac’s post-impressionist Venice paintings of the city’s iconic Santa Maria della Salute church, included in the show.
While there was a certain rivalry among these painters, it was mostly a friendly one. “I’m sure there was a sense of competition among some of the artists – they’re each trying to say something about Venice,” said Buron, “but there was a lot of sharing too, like suggestions about art suppliers to use.” Such suggestions would have come in quite handy – since Monet had not originally imagined the excursion as an extended artistic enterprise, he had not brought many art supplies to Venice, so it was essential for him to find reliable vendors within the city.
Monet in Venice is arranged by the various parts of the storied city that the impressionist painted – the Grand Canal, Palazzo Contarini (which he painted from a gondola), San Giorgio Maggiore church, and the Palazzo Ducale. Most of the sites provide multiple, slightly different versions of the same view of a location, with some outliers, such as the single painting that Monet made of a building called “the red house”, a striking, firetruck-red dwelling seen across one of Venice’s smaller side canals.
With so many near-repeating paintings, the show has a slightly different feeling than other shows of major artists. The format encourages a visitor to linger over a given set of canvasses and really absorb them, in order to pick up on the subtle changes to tone, texture, warmth and framing that Monet brought to each particular view of a location.
“There are subtle variations between them, which I think is really interesting,” said Burton. “For instance, in the two paintings of the Palazzo Ducale paintings, they look so similar, but you do see one has a slightly warmer glow than the other one.”
In the show’s final gallery, Burton showcases a number of Monet’s waterlilies, making the case that his time in Venice affected his trajectory with his late masterpieces. As Burton noted, on the eve of his trip to Venice, Monet had actually “renounced the waterlily project ‘once and for all’” after an underwhelming reaction to the series from his longtime dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, in 1907. But, after returning from Venice, Monet told Durand-Ruel that he had changed his mind and was plowing forward with the waterlilies.
“I think Monet being in Venice, where he’s surrounded by water and light every day, it’s plausible that because of that the waterlilies are something that he’s inspired to continue,” said Burton. “And we have the evidence of him saying, ‘I’m going to quit [the waterlilies] once and for all,’ and then coming back to make make even more ambitious work than he had before.”
According to Burton, Monet and Venice marks the biggest collection of the artist’s Venice paintings under one roof since his original exhibition of them in 1912. The idea came to her when she was gazing at one of Monet’s depictions of the Grand Canal, which has long been in the collection of the de Young. Enchanted by this gorgeous work, Burton envisioned a gallery full of such paintings. And now audiences in San Francisco can see the fruits of her vision.
“It’s the light, and the way that he has captured this really evanescent moment in time. I mean, it’s just so beautiful,” said Burton, “and this idea that he wrote about, it’s too beautiful to be painted, what a fascinating challenge for an artist.”
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Monet and Venice is now on show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California, until 26 July
