Lot Essay
Monet and his wife Alice first arrived in Venice on October 1, 1908. At the invitation of an American friend, Mary Hunter, they spent their first two weeks at the Palazzo Barbaro, which had been lent to Mrs. Hunter by a relative of the artist John Singer Sargent named Mrs. Curtis (fig. 1); in mid-October, they moved to the Hôtel Britannia on the Grand Canal. According to a letter which Monet wrote to Durand-Ruel on October 19th, he originally intended to remain in Venice for only a short time, and to return for a full season the following year. He was so delighted with the city, however, that he decided to stay at the Hôtel Britannia until December 7th (fig. 2).
Monet was captivated by Venice's extraordinary light effects, by a sun higher and more scintillating than any he had ever painted. Shortly after his arrival in Italy, he wrote to Gustave Geffroy, "All this unusual light... It is so beautiful!... I am having a delicious time here and can almost forget that once I was not the old man I am now!" Just as his travels to new sites in the 1880's inspired some of his most creative work of that period, his trip to Venice clearly fired his imagination. During his two-month sojourn, Monet worked on 36 canvases, each celebrating the play of the brilliant Venetian light across the city's buildings and canals. As Octave Mirbeau wrote in the catalogue for the acclaimed 1912 show at Bernheim-Jeune in which Monet's Venetian paintings were first exhibited (fig. 3):
The reflections pile up. One would say that the water and light gain support and strength on the façades... The reflection of the palaces is warm in the dense water. When the sun is high the atmosphere applies itself and sumptuously gives body to the vertical surface of the walls and the horizontal surface of the water; it is mixed with the color as though it had passed through the rose of a stained-glass window. (exh. cat., op. cit., Paris, 1912)
Other critics were similarly impressed by the shimmering, multi-colored light of this series:
In Venice substance often seems to dissolve into reflection, while light appears as material and palpable as the object it falls on. Then churches, palaces, and bridges are transmitted into curtains of colored light, wavering and trembling in their aqueous mirror; and nature, transformed by this amphibious atmosphere, becomes the imitator of art, creating scenery as insubstantially evanescent as the most impressionistic painting. (J. Walker, National Gallery of Art, New York, 1975, p. 492)
Among the 36 pictures which Monet executed in Venice, there are only two views of the Palazzo Contarini, the present version and a second one in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Saint Gallen in Switzerland (fig. 4). Situated on the southern bank of the Grand Canal east of the Ponte dell'Accademia, about half of a kilometer west of the Hôtel Britannia, the Palazzo Contarini dates from the late fifteenth century. The design of the palace, with its precisely articulated façade and soberly distributed decoration, has been attributed to the Venetian architect Codussi. The property of the Contarini family for several centuries, the palace currently belongs to the Zaffo family and is referred to as the Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo.
To paint the present scene, Monet set up his easel exactly on the opposite side of the Grand Canal from the Palazzo Contarini, in the Palazzo Franchetti (not in the Palazzo Barbaro as stated in Wildenstein's catalogue raisonné). The decorated façade of the Palazzo Contarini in Monet's picture, with the red drapery covering the upper balcony, suggests that it was painted on a holiday, most likely on November 21st, the date of the Festa della Salute. Commemorating the deliverance of Venice from the plague of 1630-1631, the Festa della Salute was celebrated by an annual visit by the doge to the church of Santa Maria della Salute, and is still remembered by a bridge of boats (Ponte del Votivo) built across the Grand Canal at the Dogana.
From the Palazzo Franchetti, Monet had an unobstructed view of the façade of the Palazzo Contarini, and its reflection in the water of the Grand Canal. This vantage point allowed him to observe the play of light over both the weather-beaten stones of the palace and the undulating waters of the canal. Monet's finished view is divided almost equally in two: the upper half of the canvas concentrates on the architectural detail of the palace, recalling his Rouen Cathedral series of 1894, while the lower portion celebrates the transitory effects of light and atmosphere on the reflected image in the rippling canal, prefiguring the artist's paintings of nymphéas on his pond at Giverny. William Seitz discussed this duality in the catalogue for a 1960 exhibition of Monet's work at The Museum of Modern Art:
Of this buoyantly beautiful group of paintings [the Venice series], the close-up views of palaces are especially interesting. Ignoring romantic clichés, and advancing from the precedent of his Poplars and the Rouen Cathedrals, Monet affixed the truncated façades of the Mula, Contarini, and Dario Palaces to the tops of his compositions, square with the frame and exactly parallel to the canvas surface. Their rhythmic horizontal and vertical architectural divisions reinforce the sparkle of light and shadow on the lapping water. In place of hackneyed bizarrerie, Monet has given us urbane formal structures; in each, the active upper portion pushes forward, while the horizontal water surface fades into the building's vertical reflection. These are the last of Monet's architectural works and the purest examples of the levitational predisposition that ties his art to that of the twentieth century. "It seems that the rose and blue façades float on the water," wrote a young French writer, Henri Genet, when the pictures were exhibited. (exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1960, p. 43)
Like the majority of the canvases which Monet began in Venice, Le Palais Contarini was completed in the artist's studio at Giverny. Although Monet was reportedly frustrated that he could not return to Venice to continue the paintings en plein-air, the finished Venetian canvases masterfully preserve the essence of each scene. Reflecting upon the interplay of nature and imagination in one of the pictures, Walker concludes:
But looking at the [painting] the question arises: has Monet gone too far in his interpretation of this light? At twilight did he actually see Venice as an architecture of amethysts, turquoise, emeralds, and rubies? Or is such a vision of intense color only a poetic invention and the reality much less colorful, much closer to the gray and black the average person sees?... The [painting] is true to nature's organization of tones; yet it is a transposition into another key, one with a more limited scale of light and shadow but, as compensation, with a greater brilliance of color. Thus, though Monet never saw a building like this, a palace made of rubble of precious stones, his canvas is still a close approximation to the relationship of light, shadow, and color in nature. (J. Walker, op. cit., p. 492)
Le Palais Contarini was purchased from Durand-Ruel in 1917 by Adolph Lewisohn, a German-born businessman who made his fortune in copper during the late nineteenth century. Adolph Lewisohn's celebrated collection of Impressionist and modern art included such masterpieces as Van Gogh's L'Arlésienne from 1888 (de la Faille, no. 488) and Gauguin's Baigneuses from a decade later (Wildenstein, no. 572), now hanging, respectively, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art (fig. 5). Upon his death in 1930, Le Palais Contarini became the property of his only son Samuel (fig. 6); it has remained in the family ever since.
This painting has been requested for the exhibition Monet and the Mediterranean, to be held at the Kimbell Art Museum from June to Sept., 1997.
(fig. 1) Postcard from Alice Monet to her granddaughter with a mark indicating the Palazzo Barbaro, Oct., 1908
(fig. 2) Claude and Alice Monet, Saint Mark's Square, winter, 1908
(fig. 3) Title page to the Bernheim-Jeune catalogue of Monet's Venetian paintings, 1912
(fig. 4) Claude Monet, Le Palais Contarini, 1908
Kunstmuseum, Saint Gallen, Switzerland
(fig. 5) Adolph Lewisohn's top-floor art gallery, 881 Fifth Avenue,
with L'Arlésienne in the upper left
(fig. 6) Samuel and Margaret Seligman Lewisohn, Saint Mark's Square, circa 1920
Monet was captivated by Venice's extraordinary light effects, by a sun higher and more scintillating than any he had ever painted. Shortly after his arrival in Italy, he wrote to Gustave Geffroy, "All this unusual light... It is so beautiful!... I am having a delicious time here and can almost forget that once I was not the old man I am now!" Just as his travels to new sites in the 1880's inspired some of his most creative work of that period, his trip to Venice clearly fired his imagination. During his two-month sojourn, Monet worked on 36 canvases, each celebrating the play of the brilliant Venetian light across the city's buildings and canals. As Octave Mirbeau wrote in the catalogue for the acclaimed 1912 show at Bernheim-Jeune in which Monet's Venetian paintings were first exhibited (fig. 3):
The reflections pile up. One would say that the water and light gain support and strength on the façades... The reflection of the palaces is warm in the dense water. When the sun is high the atmosphere applies itself and sumptuously gives body to the vertical surface of the walls and the horizontal surface of the water; it is mixed with the color as though it had passed through the rose of a stained-glass window. (exh. cat., op. cit., Paris, 1912)
Other critics were similarly impressed by the shimmering, multi-colored light of this series:
In Venice substance often seems to dissolve into reflection, while light appears as material and palpable as the object it falls on. Then churches, palaces, and bridges are transmitted into curtains of colored light, wavering and trembling in their aqueous mirror; and nature, transformed by this amphibious atmosphere, becomes the imitator of art, creating scenery as insubstantially evanescent as the most impressionistic painting. (J. Walker, National Gallery of Art, New York, 1975, p. 492)
Among the 36 pictures which Monet executed in Venice, there are only two views of the Palazzo Contarini, the present version and a second one in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Saint Gallen in Switzerland (fig. 4). Situated on the southern bank of the Grand Canal east of the Ponte dell'Accademia, about half of a kilometer west of the Hôtel Britannia, the Palazzo Contarini dates from the late fifteenth century. The design of the palace, with its precisely articulated façade and soberly distributed decoration, has been attributed to the Venetian architect Codussi. The property of the Contarini family for several centuries, the palace currently belongs to the Zaffo family and is referred to as the Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo.
To paint the present scene, Monet set up his easel exactly on the opposite side of the Grand Canal from the Palazzo Contarini, in the Palazzo Franchetti (not in the Palazzo Barbaro as stated in Wildenstein's catalogue raisonné). The decorated façade of the Palazzo Contarini in Monet's picture, with the red drapery covering the upper balcony, suggests that it was painted on a holiday, most likely on November 21st, the date of the Festa della Salute. Commemorating the deliverance of Venice from the plague of 1630-1631, the Festa della Salute was celebrated by an annual visit by the doge to the church of Santa Maria della Salute, and is still remembered by a bridge of boats (Ponte del Votivo) built across the Grand Canal at the Dogana.
From the Palazzo Franchetti, Monet had an unobstructed view of the façade of the Palazzo Contarini, and its reflection in the water of the Grand Canal. This vantage point allowed him to observe the play of light over both the weather-beaten stones of the palace and the undulating waters of the canal. Monet's finished view is divided almost equally in two: the upper half of the canvas concentrates on the architectural detail of the palace, recalling his Rouen Cathedral series of 1894, while the lower portion celebrates the transitory effects of light and atmosphere on the reflected image in the rippling canal, prefiguring the artist's paintings of nymphéas on his pond at Giverny. William Seitz discussed this duality in the catalogue for a 1960 exhibition of Monet's work at The Museum of Modern Art:
Of this buoyantly beautiful group of paintings [the Venice series], the close-up views of palaces are especially interesting. Ignoring romantic clichés, and advancing from the precedent of his Poplars and the Rouen Cathedrals, Monet affixed the truncated façades of the Mula, Contarini, and Dario Palaces to the tops of his compositions, square with the frame and exactly parallel to the canvas surface. Their rhythmic horizontal and vertical architectural divisions reinforce the sparkle of light and shadow on the lapping water. In place of hackneyed bizarrerie, Monet has given us urbane formal structures; in each, the active upper portion pushes forward, while the horizontal water surface fades into the building's vertical reflection. These are the last of Monet's architectural works and the purest examples of the levitational predisposition that ties his art to that of the twentieth century. "It seems that the rose and blue façades float on the water," wrote a young French writer, Henri Genet, when the pictures were exhibited. (exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1960, p. 43)
Like the majority of the canvases which Monet began in Venice, Le Palais Contarini was completed in the artist's studio at Giverny. Although Monet was reportedly frustrated that he could not return to Venice to continue the paintings en plein-air, the finished Venetian canvases masterfully preserve the essence of each scene. Reflecting upon the interplay of nature and imagination in one of the pictures, Walker concludes:
But looking at the [painting] the question arises: has Monet gone too far in his interpretation of this light? At twilight did he actually see Venice as an architecture of amethysts, turquoise, emeralds, and rubies? Or is such a vision of intense color only a poetic invention and the reality much less colorful, much closer to the gray and black the average person sees?... The [painting] is true to nature's organization of tones; yet it is a transposition into another key, one with a more limited scale of light and shadow but, as compensation, with a greater brilliance of color. Thus, though Monet never saw a building like this, a palace made of rubble of precious stones, his canvas is still a close approximation to the relationship of light, shadow, and color in nature. (J. Walker, op. cit., p. 492)
Le Palais Contarini was purchased from Durand-Ruel in 1917 by Adolph Lewisohn, a German-born businessman who made his fortune in copper during the late nineteenth century. Adolph Lewisohn's celebrated collection of Impressionist and modern art included such masterpieces as Van Gogh's L'Arlésienne from 1888 (de la Faille, no. 488) and Gauguin's Baigneuses from a decade later (Wildenstein, no. 572), now hanging, respectively, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art (fig. 5). Upon his death in 1930, Le Palais Contarini became the property of his only son Samuel (fig. 6); it has remained in the family ever since.
This painting has been requested for the exhibition Monet and the Mediterranean, to be held at the Kimbell Art Museum from June to Sept., 1997.
(fig. 1) Postcard from Alice Monet to her granddaughter with a mark indicating the Palazzo Barbaro, Oct., 1908
(fig. 2) Claude and Alice Monet, Saint Mark's Square, winter, 1908
(fig. 3) Title page to the Bernheim-Jeune catalogue of Monet's Venetian paintings, 1912
(fig. 4) Claude Monet, Le Palais Contarini, 1908
Kunstmuseum, Saint Gallen, Switzerland
(fig. 5) Adolph Lewisohn's top-floor art gallery, 881 Fifth Avenue,
with L'Arlésienne in the upper left
(fig. 6) Samuel and Margaret Seligman Lewisohn, Saint Mark's Square, circa 1920