Monet and his wife, Alice Hoschedé, in the Piazza San Marco in 1908. Credit… via Brooklyn Museum and Bridgeman Images. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Monet made the comment about being too old before starting to paint the town feverishly. I’ve seen enough of his paintings for now. They’re on pillowcases and doilies. They’re everywhere!
What I relish is seeing the man himself feeding the birds at Saint Mark’s Basilica with wife Alice. He sports an impromptu pigeon on his cap, and Madame a fetching hat. Walker Mimms submits a snappy account of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Monet and Venice,” which he describes as “lush and greedy.”
[About the Doge’s Palace]… Its alternating pink and white stonework, like a bar of lathered soap standing on tippy toes… Even through his fluffy brushwork and his off-kilter distances, the rectangle is pocked with seven perky Gothic windows…
When painting something famous, Monet might zoom in or swaddle it in the woozy atmospheric effect he called the “enveloppe,” to draw our attention to the act of seeing through space.
In Venice, Monet seems more cowed into representation. In the five views of San Giorgio Maggiore… he broadcasts specific pediments and column bays through his soups of periwinkle, emerald, buttercream and rose.
“It’s frightening the number of painters here, in this small square on San Giorgio,” Alice wrote to her daughter.
Plein-air realists… tended to segregate ground from water with their different kinds of brushstrokes. They seem to be intuiting what scientists have only recently found: that we perceive solids and liquids in different parts of the brain. But Monet saw things differently. He wanted to capture perception before the brain has time to digest different kinds of matter.
When the paintings went up at Bernheim-Jeune in 1912, to critical praise, he confided to his longtime dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, “They are bad and I’m certain of it.”
Claude Monet. “The Grand Canal, Venice,” 1908, oil on canvas. When Monet and his wife arrived in Venice, they hired gondolas down the Grand Canal. “I’m too old to paint such beautiful things,” he told her. Credit… via Brooklyn Museum. [New York Times caption and illustration]
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EthicalDative 
Lovely (and interesting) post!
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Thank you, Sue!
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