The Daily Telegraph

How Venice transforme­d Monet’s art

As one of his Venetian views goes on sale, Lucy Davies charts the artist’s passion for the city’s light and water

-

Claude Monet was in his late 60s when he went to Venice in 1908, and he did so as a tourist, with two new guidebooks bent into his suit jacket pocket. The telegram he sent his children on arrival said he was “enchanted” by the city but, as he remarked peevishly to his wife, Alice, that didn’t mean he should paint it. He was, he declared, “too old to be painting such beauty”.

La Serenissim­a, though, had other ideas. Besides, for an artist who had been enchanted by light and water all his life, resistance to a city that seems to be made of those two elements was quite futile. Mere days into his trip, Monet had ordered canvases and was waiting anxiously for them to arrive.

He thought he might – he told his Paris dealer and friend, Paul Durandruel – do “a few on the off chance, to retain the memory”, but even before the month was out, he had 12 on the go. By the time he left eight weeks later, that figure had risen to 37. More than he made of Rouen Cathedral in two whole years.

Which was the view that cracked his resolve? According to Helena Newman, worldwide head of impression­ist art at Sotheby’s, which is selling one of Monet’s Venice paintings this month, it is most likely the one that he saw each morning from where he was staying near the Accademia: Santa Maria della Salute. He made six paintings of the 17th-century church, whose exuberant domes absorb every nuance of the changing light, during his stay.

Last seen in public at the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas, in 1997, Le Grand Canal et Santa Maria della Salute is expected to fetch more than $50million (around £40million) in New York. A fortnight ago, it returned to Venice for the first time since Monet painted it, exhibited for a single day at the Gritti Palace, during the opening week of the Biennale Arte.

The view of the Salute from the Gritti’s porta d’acqua on the Grand Canal is almost the same as in the painting. Squint a little (and ignore the putt of motor boats), and you might imagine yourself at Monet’s shoulder.

Monet and Alice spent their first two weeks at the Palazzo Barbaro, one of the elegantly crumbling, barnacleco­ated mansions that were built along the Canal in the 14th century for merchant aristocrac­y. They were guests of the US socialite and collector Mrs Mary Hunter, a mutual friend of the painter John Singer Sargent, whose cousin owned the Barbaro.

Just across the water was the Palazzo Contarini Polignac, purchased in 1901 by the sewing machine heiress Winnaretta Singer as a birthday gift for her husband, Prince Edmond de Polignac. “Monet’s first week or so was probably incredibly glamorous,” says Newman. “His arrival was announced by the New York Herald. I imagine there were lots of soirées and parties.”

Monet’s reluctance to pick up a paint brush had to do with more than just Venice’s beauty. He was, says Newman, “probably slightly overwhelme­d by the legacy of its artists”. Certainly, the city’s atmospheri­c little streets had reeled in lots of his compatriot­s. Corot, Manet, Tissot, Boudin and Renoir had all recently had a stab, as had Whistler, Sickert and Sargent. That’s before we even get to the 18th-century view paintings by Canaletto and Guardi, whose ubiquity had numbed Venice’s marvels arguably beyond salvage. Was there anything left for Monet to say?

By October 7, though – a week after arrival – Alice writes that her husband is ready to work, but clouds and strong winds prevent him. He is, she adds, “greatly discourage­d”. On October 9, he has rallied enough to have another go, and quickly finds his theme.

“Monet is a painter of water,” Newman explains. “The Thames, Argenteuil, the water lilies at Giverny, and now once again, water is at the heart of what he is doing. Every other artist in Venice had focused on its architectu­re, but for Monet, the buildings are only an anchor for his study of light and reflection­s.”

Monet’s encounter with Venice was transforma­tive, both for the evolution of his own painting style and for the following generation of artists grappling with the potential of abstractio­n. “You feel a loosening of the palette,” says Newman. “The introducti­on of purples and the reds, and that heralds the more colourful water lilies of the late 1910s.

“There is a loosening of the brushstrok­e, too,” she adds. “It’s all about the treatment: if half of the canvas is water, and Monet is quite free with that, you’re on your way to a Rothko. It’s astonishin­g that something he didn’t intend to embark on becomes so incredibly rich and varied.”

Monet quickly settled into a discipline­d routine. From 8am, he worked on a view of the island of San Giorgio Maggiore; at 10am, he moved on to San Marco. Following a good lunch (one only has to look at photograph­s of Monet and his straining waistcoat to grasp his fondness for food) and a snooze, he took position at the Barbaro, painting Salute or Contarini Polignac. “Every day he starts new canvases with enthusiasm,” Alice wrote home. “Venice has got hold of him and won’t let him go.”

When Mrs Hunter left for Aix-enprovence, he and Alice moved a few hundred feet along the Canal to the Hotel Britannia. From here, he could see the Palazzos Dario and Da Mula, both of which he began to paint.

On October 25, he hired a gondola to better see them from the water. There, he could truly immerse himself in the light that sprang and refracted from its surface. It didn’t always go to plan: on November 14 – Monet’s 68th birthday – his gondolier couldn’t quite find the exact spot Monet had been working from. He returned to the Britannia completely furious.

Monet took care to excise signs of modern life from his paintings of Venice, and refused to work on Sundays because he could not bear the stream of passenger craft. As winter approached, he was also plagued by poor weather.

A spell of grey mist mid-november required him to trial an “effet en temps gris”, and he began painting “wrapped in a fur coat to keep the cold at bay,” though he still returned to Alice with frozen feet and chapped hands. “It is time he stopped,” she says, in a letter dated December 3, “because he’s tired as well; but how to stop painting when faced with this beautiful sky?”

Monet, meanwhile, was distraught at the idea. “The moment of leaving this unique light approaches, and I am sad,” he confessed to his friend, the critic Gustave Geffroy. “What a terrible thing not to have come here when I was younger, with all the boldness of youth!”

He left Venice on December 7. “I console myself with the thought of returning next year,” he wrote, “because I have only made attempts here, beginnings.” He continued to tinker with the paintings for years, finally exhibiting them in Paris in 1912.

If he had fallen in love with Venice, then Venice reciprocat­ed, but he never made it back.

 ?? ??
 ?? Top; with his wife Alice in Venice, above ?? La Serenissim­a: Monet’s Le Grand Canal et Santa Maria della Salute,
Top; with his wife Alice in Venice, above La Serenissim­a: Monet’s Le Grand Canal et Santa Maria della Salute,

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom