Palazzo Contarini

Monet came to Venice for the first time in the autumn of 1908, already 68 and long famous, and at first he felt the place was almost too beautiful to paint. He stayed about two months, worked all across the city, then carried the unfinished canvases back to Giverny and kept reworking them for years in his studio. This is the Palazzo Contarini seen from over the Grand Canal, its old facade rising straight out of its own reflection while the moving water breaks the stone into loose ribbons of colour. He made two versions of the view, and the upright one hangs here. His wife Alice was travelling with him. She died a few years afterward, and the grieving Monet left the Venice pictures alone for a long while before he could finish them for a Paris show in 1912.