In a significant traveling exhibition, many of Claude Monets radiant and evocative Venice paintings are to be reunited for the first time in over a century.

Monets Venice paintings are high points in his lifelong engagement with the interplay of water and light. Monet and Veniceanchored by two masterworks from the collections of Brooklyn and San Francisco, The Doges Palace and The Grand Canal, Venicewill be the first exhibition and English-language publication dedicated to this significant suite of paintings since their Parisian debut at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1912.

Monet keenly felt the burden of influence in a city that had so often been depicted and had long been an icon of waning, fragile beauty. Venice wasand isa place where culture and nature are profoundly and uniquely entangled. Monets images of Venices buildings and canals dissolved in colorful mist and hazy light may be seen as meditations on human aesthetic interaction with a natural environment built upon for centuries.

These tonally unifying atmosphereswhich he referred to as the enveloppereveal Monets essentially ecological understanding of the world in which he immersed himself. Air, light, water, and stone emerge together from a matrix of bold brushwork; buildings, reflections, and space are interconnected in luminous paintings that reinscribed and transformed the centuries-old Venetian landscape tradition. Including lush reproductions, newly commissioned texts, and maps of the artists views, this book is an essential addition to any Monet lovers library.