Monet’s Venetian Dream: Light, Water, and the Last Great Journey

This season’s must-see cultural event, Monet and Venice, is captivating audiences at the Brooklyn Museum through February 1, 2026, before traveling to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (De Young Museum) in spring 2026.

For the first time in more than a century, this landmark exhibition reunites a major selection of Claude Monet’s Venetian cityscapes—nineteen of the works he painted during a seminal trip to Venice in the autumn of 1908. At age 68, Monet was already one of the great figures of Impressionism when his wife, Alice, urged him to leave his studio in Giverny and answer the challenge of Venice. Initially reluctant—famously calling the city “too beautiful to be painted”—Monet soon became enthralled by its luminous reflections, shimmering canals and the interplay of light and architecture that aligned perfectly with his lifelong fascination with water and light.

Photo by Lily Lili: https://www.pexels.com/photo/tranquil-water-lily-pond-with-blossoming-flowers-32308453/

The exhibition’s core, drawn from public and private collections worldwide, centers on the 37 oil paintings Monet created on that trip, nineteen of which are presented together here. These works are often enigmatic: unlike many depictions of Venice by earlier artists, Monet’s canvases are remarkably devoid of human figures, focusing instead on the atmosphere as architecture and water dissolve into iridescent color.

Monet and Venice also situates these cityscapes within a broader artistic conversation, pairing them with Venetian views by Canaletto, J.M.W. Turner, John Singer Sargent and others who have captured the city’s mythic allure over centuries.

More than a traditional survey, the show is an immersive experience. The Brooklyn Museum has commissioned original sonic and visual installations—including a symphonic score by the museum’s composer-in-residence, Niles Luther—to echo the mood of Monet’s Venice, inviting visitors into an atmosphere as evocative as the paintings themselves.

Published scholarship accompanies the exhibition, with essays exploring Monet’s work from socio-historical and ecological perspectives that deepen our understanding of this pivotal late-career chapter.

Monet’s Venice series represents more than an artistic sojourn; it marks a moment of renewal and introspection late in his career. Though he visited the city only once and completed the finished paintings back in France after Alice’s death, these canvases stand among his most haunting and luminous achievements, capturing a fragile city through the fluid poetry of light and water.

If this exhibition signals anything, it is that Venice—an age-old muse—still reveals new depths when seen through the eyes of a master of color and perception.