At the Brooklyn Museum’s big exhibit, Monet and Venice, the first thing we see is a blank wall with a simple quotation from the painter: “Venice…No, I will not go to Venice.” Facing it is the inevitable outcome of pleas from his dealer, friends, and convincingly from his wife Alice—the pair in front of Saint Mark’s Basilica, surrounded by Venetian pigeons.
The museum’s notes are littered with quotable Monet: Venice is “too beautiful to be painted.” “I’m too old to paint such beautiful things.” But, in late 1908, with an invitation to visit and stay with an American couple who had rented a huge palazzo, and struggling with his early work on his Water Lilies series, the Monets arrived in Venice, supposedly to rest.
But rest was clearly not the result; Monet was soon painting daily, moving around the city in a gondola, painting ten hours a day in two-hour shifts—every day at 2 pm here, every day at 4 pm there—leaving Alice both thrilled and exhausted and sometimes lonely. He told a friend “My enthusiasm for Venice increases by the day. It is so beautiful.” Alice wrote to her daughter that “Venice has got hold of him and won’t let go.”
Their two-month stay resulted in 37 paintings, few of them completed during their stay. Nineteen of those paintings form the core of the Brooklyn Museum exhibit, along with dozens of other paintings by Monet and other artists.
It’s a fascinating show, because it addresses not just Monet’s paintings in Venice—it compares the Venice paintings with his other work, and shows how his vision of Venice contrasts with others, both contemporaries and older artists. Even as Monet worked, his colleagues were all around him: Alice frequently sat with him in the boat as he painted and wrote to a friend that there were a “frightening” number of painters at work: “There are five of them, plus a woman and Monet.”
Monet didn’t produce any extended series in different light as he did with his famous haystacks and paintings of Rouen Cathedral, but even within the few of each subject variations show: a bit more detail, a bit less haze a lighter or darker tone—but throughout an ability to indicate detail without actually showing it, to allow the subject to stand out not, if I can borrow a phrase, not as a record but an impression.
A review of his 1912 exhibition, where the paintings were first shown put it this way: “Venice is there, very present and recognizable, but it is not in the foreground, built, sculpted, inventoried; it is suspended in the mist and in a distance of space.”
Waves Breaking, 1881 / Boats on the Seine, 1874 / Cliff at Pourville, 1897The three views above are part of why contemporary critics hailed Monet as “the painter of water,” but each clearly shows water in different ways, and it seems to me as if Venice has a water of its own in Monet’s Venice. It is distinct from sky, distinct from structures, yet fully linked to them.
One of his nearly-lightless London paintings from 1903 is also in the exhibit; it has both solidity and insubstantiality, but without any of the lightness of the Venice pictures. The building is masked rather than revealed.
When the Monets returned to Giverny in December, 1908, he was already thinking about another visit. In the meantime, he returned to work on the Water Lilies, telling friends he had found new energy for them. The second visit never happened; in 1911 Alice died of pneumonia. Soon after, Monet began working again on the Venice canvases, telling friends he was imbued with the “memory of the happy days with… dear Alice.”
Interestingly, although all the canvases were completed several years later, Monet dated them all 1908, the year he began them.
Two more sets of Monet’s Venice paintings, the first three featuring Saint Mark’s and its campanile (which is shown completely restored although it was under reconstruction while Monet was there).
This series of the Palazzo Contarini is unusual for the Venice paintings; rather than painting it at the same time each day, these three show three different times of evening light.
Alice’s report of the many painters working at the same time was only a reflection of Venice’s role as a magnet for painters, perhaps reaching its height in the 19th and 20th centuries, but dating back as well to the “Grand Tour,” the 17th to 19th century travels across Europe by wealthy young aristocrats supposedly absorbing culture and history by visiting it. Paintings, especially from Venice and Rome, were often bought and brought home.
This collection of 22 prints by Michele Marieschi, an associate of Canaletto, titled Magnificent Selection of Views of Venice, served perhaps as a catalog of paintings that could be ordered. But the Venetian painters at the heart of this ‘postcard’ industry were also followed by many later painters of note whose work in the exhibit provides interesting contrasts.
John Singer Sargent painted over 200 views in Venice; a selection above and two in larger form below.
Nuts and Bolts for Monet and Venice
- Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
through February 1st, 2026
Open 11 am to 6 pm Wednesday-Sunday
General Admission is ‘pay what you wish’; recommended $20 adults, $14 students, seniors, disabilities
Monet Admission (includes general) $30 / $21
- De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
March 21 to July 26, 2026
Open 9:30 am to 5:15 pm Tuesday-Sunday
General Admission $20 adults, $17 Seniors $11 students
Monet Admission not yet listed, but in addition to General
A most enjoyable post!!