artsMonet.com

Claude Monet - The Palazzo Ducale 1908

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From the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, USA :
Daunted by Venice’s innumerable picturesque views and art-historical legacy, Monet delayed visiting the city until 1908. Once there, he explored familiar artistic concerns—reflection, atmosphere, and structure— through the city’s fundamental visual elements: its water, light, and architecture. To capture the Doge’s Palace, one of Venice’s most notable monuments, Monet positioned himself across an expanse of water, in a gondola. Despite the horizontal format of the canvas, and of the palace itself, the painter accentuated the vertical through reflection, dissolving the solid structure into a shimmer of pink, green, and yellow. Although Monet spent several sessions painting directly in front of his subject, he reworked this canvas in his Giverny studio in preparation for a 1912 exhibition.