The grand canal of Venice (Blue Venice)

In the autumn of 1874 Manet took his one trip to Venice, traveling with his wife Suzanne and the painter James Tissot, a friend then living in London. That same year the first Impressionist exhibition had opened in Paris, and Manet had spent the summer painting outdoors beside Monet at Argenteuil, on the Seine outside the city. You can see that looseness here. He worked from a boat on the Grand Canal, and everything dissolves into quick strokes of blue except the dark gondola and the tall mooring posts, painted in their spirals of blue and white. Manet made only a couple of Venetian views and grumbled that the city was hard to paint. Tissot bought this one from him the following spring. It passed later to the American collector Louisine Havemeyer, whose daughter Electra founded the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, where it hangs today.