Monet in Venice at Brooklyn Museum

Monet in Venice at the Brooklyn Museum.
 

By MICHAEL KLEIN December 9th, 2025 

Two masterpieces, the Brooklyn Museum’s own Palazzo Ducale and The Grand Canal, Venice from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, led to a thoughtful and eye-opening collaborative exhibition presenting Monet’s time in Venice, including 19 of his Venetian paintings.

At the suggestion of his wife Anna and his dealer Durand-Ruel, Monet, the 69-year-old reluctant tourist, left the security of his studio and his beautiful gardens for a trip to Venice. The results are an extraordinary body of some thirty-seven paintings, each one captures the essence of the city marked by its notable architecture and the character of light and water, twin elements that inspired the soul and temperament of this much distinguished and accomplished French artist.

More than a century ago, the Parisian debut of this most recent series by the Impressionist, Monet, was at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1912. (Remember Braque and Picasso, at the same time inventing and presenting their new art, Cubism, at the same time in the same town.) Today, in 2025, these paintings are still remarkable works of art by a painter who developed his vision from the first decade of Impressionism in the mid-19th century to the forefront of abstraction in the early 20th century. “Impressionism,” the art historian Meyer Shapiro wrote, “stands for the ‘authority of direct perception’.” The painter working in this vein seeks sensual arousal and trusts how and what he or she sees.

Monet in Venice at the Brooklyn Museum.

In 1998, the Brooklyn Museum presented Monet and the Mediterranean, reviewed then by this writer: In 1883, Renoir invited him-Monet on a trip to the Riviera. En route to the sea, they visited Cézanne in L'Estaque. Once reaching the Mediterranean, their first stop was Monaco. The warm southern climate and its lush and exotic vegetation, palm trees, lianas, and citrus trees were a glorious stimulant, and what Monet called “the most beautiful spot on the entire Riviera.” 

Three decades later, he was again a tourist, this time at the doorstep of Venice. He arrived by train as most visitors do today. His immediate attraction was the city’s unique and Byzantine-influenced architecture and, of course, the canals that unified this ancient city, a city built without roads or boulevards. It is built on a group of 118 islands that are separated by expanses of open water and by canals; portions of the city are linked by 438 bridges.

In Venice, unlike his visits to the cathedral in Rouen, France, or his days in London, or the Haystack series of the 90s, Monet paints not a single theme but the city, documenting his sojourn there. What the viewer finds in this work is tranquility; everything seems to be painted and seen in silence, no crowds, simply a reverence for what he sees, that “sensual arousal.” He captures the atmosphere of the city observed under different conditions of weather and light, and the effects of both on the subjects he chooses to paint. He painted some 15 sites during this trip in bright white morning light and at the orange-red of sunset too.

Monet in Venice at the Brooklyn Museum.

These mid-size canvases needed to be portable as he wandered the “floating city” or Queen of the Adriatic, as she is often called, looking for his favored locations such as the Palazzo Ducale; Church of an Giogio Maggoire, or Palazzo Contorini.

As part of the historic narrative, the curators have included examples by other artists who have painted Venice, for example, Canaletto and Sargent, Signac, and Renoir. (Worth noting that Edouard Manet made a similar trip in 1874-75. Manet’s focus was on the Grand Canal painterly Renderings, focused as was his method on local colors.)

Well documented with photographs and postcards, it is a well-studied episode in Monet’s very productive artistic life. Such exhibitions allow the viewer to understand how and why works of art are created and how they fit into the artist’s own history and career. WM