San Giorgio Maggiore au crépuscule

Monet only went to Venice once, in the autumn of 1908, and he almost didn't paint it at all. He felt the city was too beautiful, too painted-already, to add anything. What he found was the light at dusk across the water toward the island church of San Giorgio Maggiore, when the stone dissolves into pink and gold and the whole scene turns to atmosphere. He started the canvases there but finished them back home in his Giverny studio, working from memory, and only showed them in Paris in 1912. By then his wife Alice had died, and the Venice pictures were among the last things they had seen together. This version was bought by the Welsh collector Gwendoline Davies and left to the museum in Cardiff.