San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk

Monet painted this view of San Giorgio Maggiore in 1908, during his only visit to Venice, as part of a wider series of views of the city. The bell tower of the monastery island church rises to the top edge of the canvas and organises the whole composition. On the right, the domes of Santa Maria della Salute and the mouth of the Grand Canal are only faintly visible. The forms are gently suggested rather than fully defined, so the buildings seem to emerge from the haze and almost float in the background. Monet painted the church under six different lighting conditions. He was less interested in the monument itself than in the shifting visual experience, and the Venetian sunsets impressed him particularly. He had earlier turned to sunsets in his series of Rouen Cathedral, the Haystacks of Normandy and the views of the Houses of Parliament in London. The viewpoint is probably the Riva degli Schiavoni, the waterfront from which the island forms the focus of the scene, rather than the hotel where he stayed. Monet was uneasy among crowds of tourists and did not want to resemble other painters drawn to Venice, such as Renoir or Manet. Many of the canvases were finished back at Giverny, where he worked on them at home. He is said to have felt that Venice was too beautiful to paint, and the death of his wife Alice in 1911 seems to have helped bring the series to completion. In 1912, twenty-nine Venetian canvases were shown at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris, after which the works were dispersed. This version is held in Wales, while another is in Tokyo. The painting became widely known in 1999 when it appeared in the heist film The Thomas Crown Affair, where it is stolen from a New York museum, although the Metropolitan Museum of Art does not in fact own it.

Painter

Claude Monet

Date

1908

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

65 × 92 cm

Museum

Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, Wales

Movement

Impressionism

Genre

cityscape

Depicts

San Giorgio Maggiore

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