SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Monet and Venice is the first major international loan exhibition devoted to Claude Monet’s luminous paintings of La Serenissima. Co-organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Brooklyn Museum, Monet and Venice runs from March 21 through July 26, 2026, at the de Young museum in San Francisco, following its presentation in Brooklyn.

In October 1908, at the age of 68, Monet and his second wife, Alice, made their one and only trip to Venice. Venice was Monet’s last significant international trip and his final engagement with architectural subject matter. With more than 100 artworks on view in the exhibition galleries, Monet and Venice reveals how transformative Monet’s sojourn to Venice was by situating these paintings within the context of his illustrious career. Anchored by paintings from the Brooklyn Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the exhibition brings together more than 20 of Monet’s 37 Venice canvases. These two masterpieces—The Doge’s Palace (Brooklyn) and The Grand Canal, Venice (San Francisco)—served as inspiration for the co-organization of this exhibition.

“Although Monet visited Venice only once, his paintings of the city are among his most dazzling,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “Unlike bustling scenes painted by other artists, Monet’s Venice is hauntingly deserted, with its architecture, buildings, and canals dissolving in an atmospheric light. This exhibition offers an opportunity to experience Monet’s sublime vision of the famed Italian city, and for visitors to feel inspired by new perspectives on an artist they may think they know very well.”

Works by Monet are being lent by national and international museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and important private collections.

The presentation also features significant paintings, watercolors, and prints by select artists who worked in Venice, including Canaletto, John Singer Sargent, J. M. W. Turner, and James McNeill Whistler. Together, these works encourage the public to consider how Monet engaged with and transformed the long and rich tradition of Venetian view painting.

“Monet once remarked that he found Venice ‘too beautiful to be painted,’ and it is perhaps this very beauty, and the city’s fame, that has obscured the significance and daring nature of his paintings of Venice,” said Melissa E. Buron, Director of Collections and Chief Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, exhibition co-curator, and former Director of Curatorial Affairs of the Fine Arts Museums. “His Venetian paintings are among the most luminous and poetic of his career, yet they are often overshadowed by his depictions of the French landscape, as well as by his late works that are linked to the rise of 20th-century abstraction. His time in Venice was a critical period of creative renewal that has not previously been explored in-depth before this exhibition.”

Monet had been increasingly focused on his garden in Giverny, France during the years just before visiting Venice. He was concentrating on the elusive nature of the water lily pond’s surface. Dissatisfied with his artistic progress, he had canceled a planned 1907 exhibition of his Water Lilies. It was at this moment of frustration and creative insecurity that his wife convinced him to visit Venice for a restorative holiday.

He intended to stay only a few weeks but ultimately worked there for two months, surrounded by expanses of water, light, and reflections. All his Venice paintings focus on some combination of sky, water, and architecture, while many were painted directly from a position in a gondola on the water, harkening back to his early career when he painted from a “studio boat” on the Seine.

The exhibition’s installation unfolds chronologically and thematically along two interrelated paths: Monet’s career and depictions of Venice by his predecessors and contemporaries. Paintings, watercolors, and prints from the 18th through the early 20th centuries—from Canaletto’s scrupulously observed architecture and Turner’s atmospheric watercolors to the glimpses of shimmering canals by Sargent and humble doorways by Whistler—establish the city’s long-standing allure for tourists and artists alike. These works also provide museum visitors with crucial insights into the historic tradition of painting Venice.

Visitors are able to trace Monet’s fascination with water, reflections, and the atmospheric enveloppe through a selection of more than a dozen paintings from across his career made along the Seine, on the Normandy Coast, in London, and of his water lily pond at Giverny. This selection encourages visitors to recognize the conceptual and compositional connections among them. The Venice paintings are on view together in a penultimate gallery where they have been grouped by motifs reminiscent of their display in the artist’s 1912 exhibition where they were first presented.

Unique to San Francisco’s exhibition at the de Young museum is the reunion of all four Venetian paintings by Monet that were previously owned by Gwendolyn and Margaret Davies. The sisters bequeathed their extraordinary Impressionist collection to Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales in Cardiff. Before doing so, one of their Monet Venice paintings, Grand Canal, Venice, was sold and made its way to San Francisco where it was given by Osgood Hooker to the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

Another painting specific to the San Francisco presentation is another version of Grand Canal, Venice, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The visual dialogue between this composition and San Francisco’s painting of the same subject offers viewers the rare opportunity to notice subtle differences in Monet’s approach to the scene.

Monet and Venice is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The exhibition is curated by Lisa Small, Senior Curator of European Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and Melissa E. Buron, Director of Collections and Chief Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.