Gondola, Venice

Renoir almost never painted cities. Streets and famous monuments were not his subject at all, so it is a little surprising to find him in 1881 working his way through Venice on his first trip to Italy. He set up on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and looked back across the water toward the old customs house at the mouth of the Grand Canal. In the middle he placed a gondola, its cabin closed over two women passengers, the boatman at the stern. He painted it fast and bright, in loose dabs of colour, and when pictures like this were shown in Paris a critic dismissed them as ferocious daubs. The trip mattered more than the insult. In Italy Renoir stood before Raphael and the old wall paintings of Pompeii, and he came home doubting the whole loose Impressionist method, and soon began drawing his figures harder and firmer.