The Grand Canal, Venice

Monet did not want to go to Venice. He was 68, and the city had already been worked over by Turner, Whistler, Renoir and his friend Sargent, which struck him as reason enough to stay at home. His wife Alice talked him round, and in October 1908 they arrived as guests of Mary Hunter, an American they had met through Sargent, at the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal.

They stayed until December. He kept a timetable, taking up each motif at the same hour every day so the light would repeat, and came home with 37 canvases.

None of them was finished in Venice. He was still reworking them in the Giverny studio when Alice died in 1911, and they went on show in Paris the following year.