Venice, Palazzo Dario

Claude Monet · 1908

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

66.2 × 81.8 cm (26 1/16 × 32 3/16 in.); Framed: 79.7 × 94 × 6.1 cm (31 3/8 × 37 × 2 3/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Venice, Palazzo Dario captures the Grand Canal at its most ethereal — the fifteenth-century palace dissolving into a warm haze of reflected light, its ornate facade barely distinguishable from the water below. Monet travelled to Venice in the autumn of 1908 with his wife Alice, producing a series of paintings that rank among the most luminous of his late career. By this point his technique had moved far beyond straightforward representation: working in rapid, layered strokes, he was less interested in the Palazzo Dario as a building than as a surface for capturing the way light behaves on water and in mist. The result is closer to sensation than architecture — colour and atmosphere doing the structural work. Monet himself admitted he feared the Venice canvases would be dismissed as too insubstantial, telling a friend he had attempted the impossible. He completed most of the series back in Giverny, working from memory and sketches made on the water. This hand-painted oil reproduction on canvas faithfully recreates Monet's characteristic broken brushwork and the soft, luminous palette that makes the original, now in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, so difficult to look away from.