Le Rio de la Salute
signed and dated 'Claude Monet 1908' (lower left)
oil on canvas
31 7/8 x 251Ü2 in. (80.9 x 64.7 cm.)
Painted in 1908
Provenance

Galerie Bernheim-Jeune et Cie., Paris and Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Paris (acquired from the artist, 10 April 1912).
Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Paris (1 June 1912).
Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York (acquired from the above, 23 November 1915).
Anon. sale, Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 6 April 1954, lot 54.
O'Hana Gallery, London.
Clarissa Davidson, London.
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery Inc., New York.
Mr. and Mrs. John Mosler, New York (1965).
Anon. sale, Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 5 November 1981, lot 183B. Mr. and Mrs. J. Seward Johnson, Princeton.
Yoyoi Gallery, Tokyo.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, New York, 14 May 1985, lot 39.
Private collection, London (acquired at the above sale).
Acquired by the present owner, 1995.
Literature

A. Alexandre, "La vie artistique--Claude Monet et Venise," in Le Figaro, 29 May 1912, p. 4.
G. Geffroy, "La Venise de Claude Monet," in La Dép?che de Toulouse, 30 May 1912, p. 1.
H. Genet, "Beaux-Arts et curioàte. Les Venise de Claude Monet," in L'Oponion, 1 June 1912, p. 698.
G. Lecomte, "Un radieux po?me à la glorie de Venise..." in Le Matin, 3 June 1912, p. 6.
A. Michel, "Promenade aux Salons VI," in Journal des débats, 5 June 1912, p. 1.
"Art et Curiosité. Venise vue par Claude Monet," in Le Temps, 11 June 1912, p. 4.
G. Geffroy, Claude Monet, sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre, Paris, 1922, p. 318.
G. Seiberling, Monet's Series, New York and London, 1981, pp. 210 and 381, nos. 22 and 23 (illustrated).
D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Biographie et catalogue raisonné, Paris and Lausanne, 1985, vol. IV, pp. 242, 384 and 430, no. 1762 (illustrated, p. 243).
D. Wildenstein, Monet catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1996, vol. IV, p. 827, no. 1762 (illustrated in color).
Exhibited

Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune et Cie., Monet, Venise, May-June 1912, no. 23.
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Tableaux par Claude Monet, March 1914, no. 8.
Poughkeepsie, Taylor Art College, Vassar College, French Paintings Loaned by Durand-Ruel, February 1925.
Toronto Art Gallery, Inaugural Exhibition, January-February 1926, no. 81.
Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, International Exhibition, September-October 1926.
New York, Durand-Ruel Galleries, Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by Claude Monet, January 1927, no. 23.
Philadelphia, The Arts Club, Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Claude Monet, April 1927, no. 15.
Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Paysages d'Italie et Beautés de la Provence, 1947.
Zurich, Kunsthaus; Paris, Galerie des Beaux-Arts and The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Claude Monet, May-September 1952, no. 105 (Zurich), no. 74 (Paris), no. 82 (The Hague).
Paris, Les expositions de Beaux-Arts et de La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1954.
New York, Richard L. Feigen & Co., Claude Monet, October-November 1969 (titled Venice, Rio della Santa Salute).
Tokyo, Musée national d'Art occidental and Kyoto, Musée national d'Art moderne, Monet, October 1982-January 1983, no. 53 (illustrated in color).
Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum and Brooklyn Museum of Art, Monet and The Mediterranean, June 1997-January 1998, p. 172, no. 100 (illustrated in color p. 57; illustrated in color again, p. 174).
Lot Notes

Le Rio de la Salute is one of thirty-seven views of Venice that Monet painted during a ten-week stay in the floating city in 1908, canvases that have been widely hailed as "landmarks of late Impressionism" (in P.H. Tucker, Monet in the 20th Century, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1998, p. 14). Monet and his wife Alice traveled to Venice at the invitation of an American friend named Mary Young Hunter, whom they had met in London several years earlier. Mrs. Hunter was staying at the Palazzo Barbaro, an opulent fifteenth-century palace on the north bank of the Grand Canal that belonged to Mrs. Daniel Sargent Curtis, a relative of the painter John Singer Sargent. For the past twenty-five years, since the early 1880s, Monet had been an indefatigable traveler, seeking out new pictorial motifs in Normandy, Rouen, London, Holland, Norway, and along the Céte d'Azur. The trip to Venice would prove to be the very last painting campaign that he would ever undertake outside of Giverny, inspiring some of the most creative work of his late years. Joachim Pissarro has written: "His art was a constant search for shatteringly new pictorial motifs. From Bordighera to Venice, Monet sought visual contact with landscapes and views that possessed a sense of strangeness, unfamiliarity, and unpredictable multifariousness... Before the beauty of the Mediterranean coast, Monet saw only new visual elements that he had to dominate. To him, the Mediterranean was anything but a vacation. It was a major challenge, even an obsession, and one fraught with considerable difficulties. In the end, it introduced deep and significant changes into his art" (in exh. cat., op. cit., Fort Worth, 1997, p. 15).

Although Alice was enthusiastic about visiting Venice, Monet was initially reluctant to undertake the trip. He had not traveled extensively since his final campaign in London in 1901, and he was completely absorbed by 1908 with the painting of his water-lily garden at Giverny. However, Venice had been indelibly printed on Monet's artistic consciousness since 1882, when Renoir contributed to the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition two views of the city that he had painted during a lengthy trip to Italy the previous year. Monet and Renoir traveled together to the Italian Riviera for two weeks in December 1883, and Monet returned on his own for the first three months of 1884, lodging at the small fishing village of Bordighera. Particularly during the latter trip, the exotic and sun-drenched landscape of Italy proved a source of profound artistic inspiration for Monet. Shortly before leaving Bordighera, he wrote to Durand-Ruel, "Shall we ever be able to feel contented before nature, above all in this place? When surrounded with such dazzling light, one finds one's palette rather poor. Here art would need tones of gold and diamonds..." (quoted in ibid., p. 38). Despite his reservations about traveling to Venice in 1908, Monet ultimately could not resist the allure of another Italian campaign. A letter from Alice to her daughter Germaine indicates that the artist finally agreed to the journey on September 25th; six days later, the couple disembarked in Venice.

Within a week of their arrival, Monet was hard at work. Although he initially deemed Venice "too beautiful to be painted" and himself "too old to paint such beautiful things," Alice could soon write to Germaine, "I am happy now to see Monet so full of zeal, and doing such great things, and between you and me, something besides the inevitable water-lilies" (quoted in ibid., pp. 49 and 52). As he had in London, Monet selected a limited group of motifs for his Venetian oeuvre. In Venice, however, rather than charting the changes in light on a given site from morning to evening, he opted to work on the same motif at the same time each day. Starting around 8:00 a.m., he painted the fa?ade of the Doges' Palace on the island of San Marco, setting up his easel either on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore (Wildenstein, nos. 1751-1756; fig. 2) or on a gondola moored off the shore (Wildenstein, nos. 1742-1744). He then reversed his vantage point, positioning himself on the island of San Marco and painting the church of San Giorgio (Wildenstein, nos. 1745-1750). In the afternoon, he stayed close to the Palazzo Barbaro, looking across the Grand Canal toward the church of Santa Maria della Salute (Wildenstein, nos. 1736-1741) and a series of Renaissance residences on the right bank: the Palazzo Dario, the Palazzo da Mula, and the Palazzo Contarini (Wildenstein, nos. 1757-1760, 1764-1767; fig. 3).

In each of these subseries, there are two principal factors of variation. The first is the constantly changing play of reflections on the gently rippling water, effects that had concerned him as well in his Poplars and Mornings on the Seine series in the 1890s and in his work from London in 1899-1901. The second is the famous Venetian haze (what Monet called the enveloppe), which either heightens the colors of the prism or unites them in a muffled harmony. Joachim Pissarro has explained, "Monet followed a procedural methodology not unlike that of an experimental scientist who endeavors to safeguard the accuracy of his results through a thoroughly controlled environment with known variables. Monet very carefully established his experimental ground to enable his 'pictorial truths' to develop. The conditions set for his pictorial investigation were very strict and rigorous. One could say, in fact, that Monet attempted to eliminate time as a variable, to better concentrate on the interrelationships between atmosphere, light, color--and, of course, how the water refracted those elements" (ibid., p. 51).

The present canvas is one of three views that Monet painted of a narrow canal known as the Rio della Salute, named for the nearby church of Santa Maria della Salute (Wildenstein, nos. 1761-1763). Along with two paintings of San Giorgio at sunset (Wildenstein, nos. 1768-1769) and two oil sketches of gondolas (Wildenstein, nos. 1771-1773), the depictions of the Rio della Salute are among the very last canvases that Monet began during his Venetian sojourn. To paint the Rio della Salute series, Monet set up his easel in a gondola in the southern part of the canal, looking north toward one of two small, arched bridges that span the waterway (fig. 4). On the right is the garden wall of the Seminario Patriarcale, with tree branches overhanging it; on the left is a multi-storied house fa?ade with ornate windows and balconies, and in the distance is the apsidal east end or chevet of the church of San Gregorio. The three canvases were all painted in the afternoon, the warm light suffusing the scene in rich hues of rose and gold. Pissarro has written about this group of paintings, "These works certainly stand out among Monet's entire Venice production... More so than any other group, the Rio della Salute series emphasizes one's perspective of Venice from within its meandering canals as they cut through the awesome slabs of erect architecture on each side" (in op. cit., p. 172).

In compositional terms, the views of the Rio della Salute also recall a group of three canvases that Monet had painted in Italy in 1884, depicting the village of Dolceacqua in the Alps outside of Bordighera, viewed from the Nervia Valley below (Wildenstein, nos. 882-884; fig. 5). As in the paintings of the Rio della Salute, the center of the Dolceacqua compositions is anchored by a narrow, hump-backed bridge; the architecture of the village rises to the right, crowned by the medieval fortress of the Doria family. Comparing the two series of paintings, Pissarro has written, "The dramatic motifs packed into each of the works--the sharp mountainous village soaring above the fishbone-thin, fragile bridge; the tight, narrow canal of the Rio della Salute contrasting with the vertical structure of the abutting palaces--bring to mind analogous spatial conceptions and similar compositional problems" (in ibid., p. 57). Indeed, just two years after Monet's death, a canvas from the Dolceacqua series (Wildenstein, no. 882) was paired with one of the Rio della Salute views (Wildenstein, no. 1763) in the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition at Durand-Ruel's gallery, underscoring the links between Monet's work during his two major painting campaigns in Italy, separated by more than two decades.

According to a letter that Monet wrote to Durand-Ruel on October 18th, he and Alice initially planned to remain in Venice for only a short time and to return for a longer campaign the following year. Wholly absorbed in his work, however, the artist repeatedly delayed their departure; as Alice told Gustave Geffroy in mid-November, "Venice has got hold of him and won't let go!" (quoted in P.H. Tucker, op. cit., p. 54). The couple finally left Venice to return to Giverny on December 7th, more than two months after they had arrived. On his last day in Italy, Monet himself wrote to Geffroy, "[My enthusiasm for Venice] has done nothing but grow, and the moment has now come to leave this unique light. I grow very sad. It is so beautiful, but one has to see reason: many factors force us to return home. The only consolation I have is the thought of coming back here next year, for I have been able to do nothing but sketches, beginnings. But what a dreadful shame that I did not come here when I was young and would dare anything! Anyway...I have spent some delightful moments here and nearly forgot that I am the old man that I am" (quoted in ibid., p. 53). Monet never did return to Venice; for the next two decades, until his death in 1926, he was entirely occupied by his work on the water-lily pond at Giverny.

Of the thirty-seven views of Venice that Monet is known to have painted, few (if any) were finished during his stay in Italy, and some may not even have been begun. Back in his studio, it took the artist more than three years to bring the series to completion. When he first returned, he was busy selecting the paintings for the major exhibition of water-lily canvases that took place at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in May 1909. The following year brought personal tragedy: the Epte flooded, causing serious damage to the lily garden, and Alice took seriously ill. It would not be until October 1911, several months after Alice's death, that Monet finally took up the Venice views once again; he released the first twelve canvases of the series, including the present example, to Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune only in March 1912.

Several factors might explain the difficulties that Monet experienced in finishing the Venice paintings. The first is anxiety about Venice's eminent place in the history of western art. In addition to the long line of venerated masters that the city had produced, from Giorgione and Titian to Tintoretto and Tiepolo, Venice had also attracted scores of foreign artists, including Turner, Bonington, Manet, Boudin, Whistler, Sargent, and of course, Renoir. Matisse visited the city in 1907 and Signac painted there in 1903, 1904, and 1908, the year of Monet's own trip. At the same time, Venice had also become a prime tourist destination by Monet's day, its landscape exploited by vedute painters in the tradition of Guardi and Canaletto, who devoted themselves to producing paradigmatic images for Europeans on the Grand Tour. Paul Tucker has explained Monet's dilemma: "How was Monet going to reconcile the opposing sides of this Janus-like city? How could he pay homage to its celebrated history, perhaps even contribute to its artistic legacy, when he was painting the very kinds of subjects that had been rendered so often that they had become almost meaninglesà Would he not be perceived as pandering to public taste instead of trying to elevate it, which was his responsibility as one of France's leading painterà" (in op. cit., p. 56).

By all accounts, Monet was an unequivocal success at navigating these perilous aesthetic waters and defining new visual territory for Venice. His solution was to emphasize the city's mirage-like quality, depicting the buildings as emerging mysteriously from the enveloping atmosphere or floating magically on the surface of the rippling canals. When twenty-nine of the Venice views, including the present canvas, were exhibited at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in May-June 1908 (fig. 6), they met with universal acclaim. Pissarro has written, "Monet's Venise was celebrated, almost unanimously, as one of the great feats in the history of painting. Up to that point, Monet had never been so unreservedly lauded" (in op. cit., p. 68). At Monet's request, the essay for the exhibition catalogue was written by Octave Mirbeau, an outspoken social critic and the perfect author to counter any suggestion that Monet had been seduced in Venice by the purely picturesque. Mirbeau first dismissed Venice itself as "a city that was no more than a color postcard...a town that is no longer a town but a mere decoration, a motif," and then went on to extol Monet as "the master of unseizable light," declaring, "No future painter will be able to be free of the problems that Claude Monet has solved or posed. The work of Claude Monet has already passed into the language of painting, as the work of a writer of genius passes into the language of writing and enriches it forever" (quoted in P. Tucker, op. cit., p. 57).