Venice: From Canaletto and Turner To Monet

Discover Venice in a splendid volume of masterpieces by artists such as Canaletto, William Turner, Paul Signac, and Claude Monet. Thanks to its unique qualities—the beguiling interplay of light, water, and atmosphere—Venice was elevated to a magical “laboratory of perception” in the nineteenth century. Like many other artists, Claude Monet also sojourned in the city with its lagoons and islands, where he was inspired to create his famous Venice cycle in the autumn of 1908. His Venetian paintings mark a turning point in his work as he adopted an increasingly abstract pictorial vocabulary, demonstrating that Venice made a considerable, albeit little noted, contribution to the emancipation of painting, just as it was poised on the threshold of modernity. This splendid volume, filled with large-format color illustrations, is the first to provide a comprehensive examination of Venice’s image in European and American painting of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the center of this well-informed exploration is Monet’s Venice cycle, supplemented by masterpieces by his predecessors and contemporaries, ranging from Canaletto to Turner to Paul Signac.