RCEWA – by

Statement of the Expert Adviser to the Secretary of State that the painting meets Waverley criteria two and three.

Further Information

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Claude Monet (1840-1926) Le Palais Ducal, 1908 Oil on canvas 81 x 93 cm

Claude Monet painted Le Palais Ducal during and after his visit to Venice in 1908. It shows the sun-lit Doges’ Palace with its reflection in the water reaching down the height of the canvas. As opposed to the campaigns of painting previously undertaken in London, Monet was seeking a rest from work on the water lily paintings and took the chance of a holiday with his wife Alice who chronicled the stay through daily letters home. While in Venice Monet began to paint and anticipated a second visit to follow in 1909, but the deterioration of Alice Monet’s health prevented the couple’s return.

As with other campaigns, Monet anticipated that related works would be shown together although he was eventually to declare that ‘there was not a series among the views’. The Venetian paintings are, indeed, distinguished by a wider range of motifs and a smaller number of completed canvases than had been established with previous series. Both are attributable to Monet scouting for promising subjects as he extended his stay and which he imagined pursuing on a later visit. During the two-month stay he began at least thirty-seven canvases, of which he selected twenty-nine for inclusion Claude Monet: Venise at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in in May 1912.

Of the nine Venetian motifs, nine paintings depicting the Doges’ Palace are recorded in the Catalogue raisonné. Six of these show the view from San Giorgio Maggiore and three, including the present canvas, the oblique close-up of the façade onto the Bacino. Monet worked on this motif in situ (as the date accompanying the signature suggests) but probably brought the present canvas to completion at during 1911-12. It was not included in his 1912 Venise exhibition, but it was shown in Paris a year later. The critical success of the water lily paintings when shown in 1909 created a demand for his contemporaneous Venetian views, and ensured the success of the 1912 exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. Monet’s reputation remains undiminished, with the works of this late period prized for their extension of and their anticipation of later abstract painting. The combination of formal structure and scintillating brushwork is particularly evident in Le Palais Ducal which is of great aesthetic value in itself (Waverley 2) and as part in Monet’s last urban series.

While Monet is amongst the most widely studied artists there continues to be new research associated with his work (Waverley 3), as its inclusion in Monet and Architecture (National Gallery) demonstrated last year. The Venetian series still remains relatively overlooked, with the scholarship concerned primarily with Monet’s inability to return to the city to make a series. This – and the success of the water lily series – has overshadowed the place of the Venetian paintings in the growing international market for modernism at the time, exemplified by the inclusion of Le Palais Ducal in Erich Goeritz’s formidable collection. DETAILED CASE

Claude Monet (1840-1926) Le Palais Ducal, 1908 Oil on canvas 81 x 93 cm signed and dated bottom right ‘Claude Monet 1908’

Provenance:

Acquired from the artist jointly by Galerie Durand-Ruel and Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 8 March 1913; By whom placed on consignment to Paul Cassirer, Berlin 1914; From whom ‘seized by the German Government, 1914’;1 Acquired from Cassirer by Hans Wendland, Berlin, 19 January 1918;2 By whom sold to Galerie Thannhauser, Lucerne, Berlin & Munich, 4 September 1924; Where acquired by Erich Goeritz (1889 – 1955), Berlin and London, 1 April 1926; By descent to Thomas Goeritz, London, c.1957; By descent; By whom sold Sotheby’s London, 26 February 2019.

Selected exhibitions:

Art moderne, Galerie Manzi-Joyant, Paris, 23 June – 10 July 1913, no.72 Internationale Ausstellung, Kunsthalle, Bremen, 1 Feb. – 31 Mar. 1914, no.250, repr. Franzosische Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts, Galerie Ernst Arnold, Dresden, April-May 1914, no.77 On extended loan to Toronto Art Gallery, 1946-1950 Claude Monet, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Aug.-Sept. 1957 and Tate Gallery, London, Sept.- Nov. 1957, no.110, repr. pl.24k A Great Period of French Painting; in Memory of the late Miss Clariça Davidson, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London, June-July 1963, no.22, repr. p.24 The French Impressionists and some of their Contemporaries; in Aid of the National Playing Fields Association and The Jewish National Fund, Wildenstein, London 24 April – 18 May 1963, no.45, repr. Venice Rediscovered; in Aid of the Venice in Peril Fund, Wildenstein, London 8 Nov. – 15 Dec. 1972, no.25, repr. fig.61. Monet, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 9 Oct. – 25 Nov. 1982, and National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 8 Dec. 1982 – 30 Jan. 1983, no.52 repr. (as Le Palais des Doges, Venise) Monet and Architecture, National Gallery, London, 9 April – 29 July 2018, no.189, repr.

Selected literature:

Gustave Geffroy, ‘La Venise de Claude Monet’, La Dépêche de Toulouse, 30 May 1912, p.1; Wilken von Alten, ‘Die Internationale Ausstellung in der Bremer Kunsthalle’, Kunst und Künstler, 1914, p.386; Emil Waldmann, ‘Notizen zur Franz. Ausstellung in Dresden’, Bremen, Kunst und Künstler, April 1914, p.389-92; Lionello Venturi, Les Archives de l’Impressionnisme, Paris and New York 1939, vol.1, pp.434-7; René Julian, ‘Les Impressionistes français et l’Italie’, in Publications de l’Institut français de Florence, Florence and Paris 1968, no.II-11, p.19;

1 Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Catalogue Raisonné, Cologne 1996, vol.IV, p.814, no.1744. 2 Sotheby’s provenance, 26 February 2019, lot 6, not given in Wildenstein 1996. Grace Seiberling, Monet’s Series, New York 1981, pp.210, 380, no.13; Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Biographie et catalogue raisonné, Lausanne 1985, vol.IV, no.1744, repr. p.235; Philippe Piguet, Monet et Venise, Paris 1986, repr. p.75, no.9; Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Catalogue Raisonné, Cologne 1996, vol.IV, no.1744, p.814, repr. p.813; Richard Thomson, Monet and Architecture, exh. cat., National Gallery, London 2018, p.200.

Claude Monet visited Venice in October-November 1908, on a holiday from an intense period of activity on his water lily paintings. He and his wife Alice arrived on 1 October, accompanying Mrs Mary Hunter, a friend who had provided support during his visits to London and with whom they stayed in the Palazzo Barbaro near the Ponte dell’Accademia. Armed with John Ruskin’s St Mark’s Rest (newly translated into French),3 they began by seeing the sights and especially the work of the great Venetian painters. On 7 October Monet began to paint,4 in order to ‘have a souvenir of the place’ to be pursued on a prospective return visit.5 The holiday thus became a painting trip, and the Monets, outstaying Mrs Hunter, moved to the Grand Hotel Britannia, east along the , on 16 October.6 The rather impromptu arrangements for the trip (Monet only alerted his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel a week before setting out),7 had not accounted for the variable weather; later in the month, Alice Monet told her daughter ‘it is terribly cold here and the wind is icy, and Monet can only work on two pictures … It is a great shame, because there are so many good things in the making’.8

The ‘good things’ came from a daily work pattern that was quickly established. They rose at 6am, reached San Giorgio by 8 o’clock to paint the view of the Piazzetta and the Doges’ Palace, and, at 10am, moved to paint the reverse view of San Giorgio itself. Having addressed the Salute after lunch, they took to the water by gondola at 3pm.9 The morning position on the terrace of San Giorgio Maggiore eventually yielding six canvases, offering a distant frontal panorama of the Doges’ Palace and the entrance to the Piazzetta that recalls J.M.W. Turner’s Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom-House, Venice: Canaletti Painting c.1833 (then in the National Gallery, transferred to Tate 1912). The group of three paintings, of which Le Palais Ducal is one, offers a closer and more oblique view of the Doges’ Palace, with the sun fully illuminating the façade and the building anchored by the strongly dappled reflection in the waters of the Lagoon. Some commentators have placed the painter’s vantagepoint on the terrace of the Dogana,10 but the angle of the building makes it more likely to have been seen from a gondola during the afternoon sessions.11 All three paintings are

3 John Ruskin, Le Repos de Saint-Marc. Histoire de Venise pour les rares voyageurs qui se soucient encore de ses monuments, trans K. Johnston, Paris 1908; cited in Jacqueline Guillard and Maurice Guillard eds. Claude Monet au temps de Giverny, exh. cat., Centre Culturel du Marais, Paris 1983, p.138. 4 Alice Monet to Germaine Salerou, 7 Oct. 1908, extracted in Philippe Piguet, Monet et Venise, Paris 1986, p.28. 5 Claude Monet to Paul Durand-Ruel, 19 Oct. 1908, transcribed in Guillard and Guillard 1983, p.284. 6 Alice Monet to Germaine Salerou, 16 Oct. 1908, in Piguet 1986, p.30. 7 Claude Monet to Paul Durand-Ruel, 25 Sept. 1908, in Guillard and Guillard 1983, p.283. 8 Alice Monet to Germaine Salerou, 24 Oct. 1908, in Piguet 1986, p.34, translated in Stephan Koja, Claude Monet, exh. cat., Osterrichische Galerie - Belvedere, Vienna 1996, p.150. 9 Alice Monet to Germaine Salerou, 12 Oct. 1908, in Piguet 1986, p.30. 10 Piguet 1986, p.65; Koja 1996, p.150. 11 See Paul Hayes Tucker, ‘The Revolution in the Garden: Monet in the Twentieth Century’, in Monet in the 20th Century, exh. cat., Royal Academy, London 1999, p.53; Richard Thomson, ‘Interiorité, Memoire, Nostalgie’, in Claude Monet 1840-1926, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris 2011, p.289. signed and dated ‘1908’, and while the painting now in the Brooklyn Museum is proportionally wider, all are loosely painted, with the pink façade breaking into an especially energetic treatment of the reflection in the water.

When Monet returned to in December 1908, he consigned twenty-eight views of Venice to Bernheim-Jeune. Characteristically, he retained them in his studio. It was not until late 1911 when, mourning the loss of his wife whose presence the paintings evoked, he began ‘to finish some pictures of Venice’.12 By the time of Claude Monet: Venise at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in May 1912 a twenty-ninth painting had been added. Monet stressed that ‘there was not a series among the views, just different motifs repeated one, two, or three times.’13 Reflecting on this moment, one commentator has remarked that Monet’s usual anxieties around the exhibition may have reflected a fear that the Venetian works would ‘be considered … a highly commercial venture that would tarnish his reputation’.14 For his part, Daniel Wildenstein notes of Le Palais Ducal that, after the exhibition, ‘Monet wanted to “take advantage” of the fact that he had the two previous canvases “before his eyes” in order “to finish one of them”.’15 He identifies this ‘finishing’ with the present painting, which was not included in the 1912 exhibition.

Monet’s practice had long included continuing work on the canvas in his studio in Giverny. This must be the case for Le Palais Ducal, which can be considered a summation of the subject explored in the two related canvases. This is evident in the compositional structure. It may be seen, for instance, in the way in which the vertical sunlit form of palace-and-reflection is anchored off-centre in the composition by locating the Gothic canopy above the central balcony exactly half-way across the painting. There is a strictness in this structure that anticipates later abstraction and provides an underpinning for the loose, flickering brushstroke that epitomises Monet’s late work and so readily captures the way in which the building seems to rise directly from the water in the foreground.

The success of such works was immediate. The painter Paul Signac wrote to Monet ‘these Venetian pictures are stronger still, where everything supports the expression of your vision, where no detail undermines the emotional impact’.16 The distribution of the Venetian paintings, through the exhibition in 1912 and subsequently, is traced through the Catalogue raisonné. Gwendoline Davies bought two of the views of San Giorgio in 1912, to which her sister added The Palazzo Dario a year later.17 They bequeathed these paintings to the National Museum of Wales ensuring that three of Monet’s thirty-seven Venetian works are on public view in Britain. Le Palais Ducal passed between the artist’s Parisian dealers and those in Germany, Cassirer and Thannhauser, who supported his work. It was through the latter that Erich Goeritz acquired the painting in 1926 and it remained with him and his family until recently. As a Jewish collector committed to modernism, Goeritz formed a significant art collection, but needed to get out of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, first to Luxembourg and then to London. His enthusiasm for art did not falter; he was a major donor to the Tel Aviv Museum in 1933, as well as bringing the works of then little-known German artists to Britain through

12 Claude Monet to Paul Durand-Ruel, 10 Oct. 1911, in Koja 1996, p.212. 13 Claude Monet to Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, quoted by Tucker 1999, p.55. 14 Tucker 1999, p.55. 15 Wildenstein 1996, vol.IV, p.814. 16 Paul Signac to Claude Monet, 31 May 1912, quoted in Turner Whistler Monet, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London 2005, p.207. 17 They also owned Venise, 1908, now in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Catalogue raisonné no.1736. gifts of seven portfolios of Lovis Corinth’s prints, together with other modernist prints, to the British Museum in 1942. In 1936 Goeritz had given Corinth’s The Temptation of St Anthony after Gustave Flaubert 1908 to the Tate Gallery. In contrast to Corinth’s symbolist tour-de-force, Monet’s Venetian works combined observation with a subsequent reassessment that resulted in what one scholar has described as ‘mediations on the nature of experience, the practice of art, and the multiple levels of human understanding’.18

18 Tucker 1999, pp.56-7.