Le Palais Ducal

In the autumn of 1908 Monet came to Venice for the first and only time. He was 68, on holiday with his wife Alice, and at first he refused to work, saying the city was too beautiful to paint. He gave in and spent about three months at it, setting up on a boat moored in the lagoon and painting the Doge's Palace straight across the water as the light changed through the day. He carried the canvases home to Giverny unfinished. Alice died in 1911 before he was done with them, and he completed the whole Venice series from memory in his studio, showing the pictures in Paris in 1912. By then his own eyes were starting to cloud with the cataracts that would trouble his last years.