Gondole à Venise

Monet reached Venice at the end of September 1908, aged 68 and on a trip he had resisted making, and stayed until December. He painted this on 3 December, the last canvas of the visit, and that same evening the return tickets were booked. The others he carried home were reworked in the studio at Giverny for three years before he would let them be shown. This one he left as it stood, a gondola between mooring posts with the water broken up beneath it. He gave it to Georges Clemenceau, a friend of nearly 50 years and twice head of the French government, who left it in turn to the museum at Nantes. It arrived there in 1930, a few months after Clemenceau's death.