Monet Reproduction of
The Grand Canal

The Grand Canal, Venice

Oil in canvas, 1908

You can now own a Monet reproduction of The Grand Canal hand-painted at museum quality and guaranteed for one year.

This classic view of the Grand Canal, Venice was painted from the vantage point of the Accademia bridge, and shows the salute in the middle ground and behind it the tower of the Doge’s Palace. Like Manet, who painted the same scene in 1875, Claude Monet used the mooring-poles to counterbalance the horizontal strokes defining the canal itself.

Although the Salute is prominent, one senses that it was the painting of the water that truly interested him. It has been pointed out that the pole intersecting the canvas two thirds across its width is in compliance with the golden section. You wonder if Monet, who prided himself on being a painter of instinct (‘painting as the bird sings’), was aware of such refinements?

The lengthy trip to Venice in the autumn of 1908 was unique in one respect: Monet was accompanied by his wife Alice. Previously he had always gone alone on his painting expeditions, whether to Belle-Ile, or Etretat, Bordighera or Antibes.

On this particular visit he worked hard – there was an exhibition held by Durand-Ruel in 1912 of 29 paintings from Venice – but you can understand from his letters that he also enjoyed himself as a tourist. “I am spending some delightful days here”, he wrote to Gustave Geffroy, “almost forgetting I am not the old man I am in reality”.

Installed in the Grand Hotel Britannia on the Riva degli Schavoni, he could see from his balcony the comings and goings on the Lagoon and the streamers leaving for the Lido and Chioggia. He visited the museums and churches and strolled in St Mark’s Square. There is a photo of him with Alice feeding the pigeons.

The canvases started in Venice and completed in the studio on his return, together with some executed entirely at Giverny, reveal that Venice did not make him change the habits of a lifetime: he viewed the monuments and facades of the palaces in just the same way he had studied the front of Rouen Cathedral, noting the effects of the light playing over it, interested only in the way the architecture was transmuted by the alterations in the atmosphere.

Decidedly, with Canaletto or Guardi he had nothing in common, although there are distinct analogies with Turner. In these Venice paintings Monet’s vision tends more to Romanticism than usual, recalling not only Turner, but Whistler, who loved Venice and had talked to Monet about it with such enthusiasm that he decided he had to see it for himself.

“What a tragedy not to have come here when I was younger”, he wrote in a letter to Geffroy. When he left he declared he would return the following year, but Alice’s illness and death relegated that ambition to the back of his mind.

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The Grand Canal, Venice
By Monet

Impressionist Art Gallery
Oil Painting Reproductions of Impressionist Masterpieces

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