Palazzo da Mula, Venice

Monet painted Palazzo da Mula, Venice in 1908 during his only visit to Venice, at the age of 68. He had resisted the city for years, fearing it would be too painterly - too beautiful, too easy, too seductive. When he finally arrived in October 1908, he was overwhelmed. Over the next two months, he produced some thirty canvases of the city's light and architecture. This painting depicts the Palazzo da Mula, a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal, seen from across the water. The building's ornate marble facade is dissolved in Monet's characteristic broken brushwork, the details of its architecture suggested rather than described. The water of the canal reflects the palace in ribbons of blue, green, and gold that merge with the sky above. Monet's Venice paintings are among his most openly sensual works. The city's unique light - refracted by water at every angle, filtered through sea haze, bouncing between palazzo facades and canal surfaces - proved an irresistible challenge for an artist who had spent his career pursuing the effects of light on buildings and water. Venice gave him both, simultaneously, in overwhelming abundance.

Monet's Venice series proved that even the most painted city in the world could yield new visual discoveries when seen through the lens of Impressionism. His Venice paintings influenced every subsequent artist who approached the city, from Sargent to Turner's heirs.

Palazzo da Mula represents the full maturity of Monet's vision - a late style in which architecture and atmosphere have become indistinguishable, where the solid marble of a Venetian palace dissolves into the same shimmering field of color as the water that reflects it.