‘What a wonderful challenge for an artist’: How Monet captured Venice in his twilight years | Claude Monet

Claude Monet was 68 years old before he set foot in Venice, and it is surprising that he kept his distance from the city that over hundreds of years attracted many of Europe’s best painters. When Monet finally got there, he painted dozens of paintings, and the French Venetian Impressionist’s works are now the subject of a show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, titled simply Monet and Venice.

“Maybe it was insecurity, because the Venetian drawings were very famous and by many of the biggest names in Western history,” said Melissa Burron, who co-curated the exhibition with Lisa Small. As she points out, given Venice’s artistic lineage, even an artist like Monet would have reason to feel intimidated by the location.

In addition to collecting two dozen of the Frenchman’s works in Venice, the gallery also presents Venetian paintings by other greats – including James McNeil Whistler, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, John Singer Sargent, J. M. W. Turner, and Paul Signac. The show concludes with a number of early pieces by Monet and some late Water Lilies, comprising more than 100 works overall. The result is a wonderful, airy holiday afternoon filled with plenty to tempt the eye.

Although from the outside it may seem like a slam dunk on the pairing of Monet and Venice, the truth is that the world may have never known what the city of waters and historic bridges looked like through the eyes of the great Impressionist. Monet’s visit to Venice was originally scheduled to last just two weeks – not enough time for the paint to dry – but he extended his stay to two months, allowing him to produce dozens of oils.

“We wanted to emphasize in the exhibition that his trip to Venice was not preordained,” Boron said. “I thought at first he was an artist in water and light, and of course he would go to Venice, but that almost never happened.”

According to Bouron, when Monet and his wife Alice arrived in Venice, the artist was able to integrate into the community of like-minded people painting the most famous sights of the canal-rich city. Although Monet might have been known to some as a successful painter, the couple was mostly able to blend in among the other tourists. “It was like a second honeymoon for them to be able to have this experience in their later years,” Boron said.

Monet was a friend of Whistler, Sargent, Renoir and Signac, and so was familiar with at least some of their work in Venice. While in London outside of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, he would see Turner’s works in Venice at the National Gallery, and even purchased one of Senac’s post-Impressionist Venetian paintings for the city’s famous church of Santa Maria della Salute, which was included in the exhibition.

Although there was a certain rivalry between these painters, it was mostly a friendly rivalry. “I’m sure there was a sense of competition among some of the artists — each trying to say something about Venice, but there was a lot of sharing as well, like suggestions about which art suppliers to use,” Boron said. Such suggestions would have been very helpful – since Monet did not originally envision the trip as an extended artistic project, he did not bring many art supplies to Venice, so it was necessary for him to find reliable sellers within the city.

Monet arranged Venice through the various parts of the storied city that the Impressionist had painted – the Grand Canal, the Palazzo Contarini (which he painted from a gondola), the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, and the Palazzo Ducale. Most sites offer multiple, slightly different versions of the same view of the site, with a few outliers, such as Monet’s only painting of a building called “The Red House,” a striking firetruck-red dwelling that can be seen across one of Venice’s smaller side canals.

With many semi-repetitive panels, the show has a slightly different feel to other shows by major artists. This format encourages the visitor to linger on a particular group of paintings and truly absorb them, in order to capture the subtle changes in tone, texture, warmth, and framing that Monet brought to each site-specific viewing.

“There are subtle differences between them, which I think is really interesting,” Burton said. “For example, in the two Palazzo Ducale paintings, they look very similar, but you see that one has a slightly warmer glow than the other.”

In the gallery’s final exhibition, Burton displays a number of Monet’s Water Lilies, demonstrating that his time in Venice influenced his path with his later masterpieces. As Burton noted, on the eve of his trip to Venice, Monet had “actually abandoned the water lily project ‘once and for all’” after a disappointing reaction to the series from his old dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, in 1907. But after his return from Venice, Monet told Durand-Ruel that he had changed his mind and was going ahead with planting water lilies.

“I think Monet being in Venice, where he was surrounded by water and light every day, it stands to reason that because of that the water lilies are something that inspired him to continue,” Burton said. We have evidence that he said, “I will resign.” [the waterlilies] Once and for all, then he returns to doing work even more ambitious than he had before.

According to Burton, Monet and Venice represents the largest collection of the artist’s paintings in Venice under one roof since his original exhibition of them in 1912. The idea came to her while she was staring at one of Monet’s paintings of the Grand Canal, which had long been in the de Young’s collection. Fascinated by this magnificent work, Burton envisioned a gallery filled with such paintings. And now audiences in San Francisco can see the fruits of her vision.

“It’s the light, the way he captured this really fleeting moment in time. I mean, it’s so beautiful, and this idea that he wrote about, it’s too beautiful to be painted, what a wonderful challenge for an artist,” Burton said.

• Monet and Venice is now on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California, until July 26