The Brooklyn Museum to Present Monet and Venice, the First Major Exhibition in over a Century Dedicated to Claude Monet’s Venetian Cityscapes

Tickets on sale now 

On view October 11, 2025–February 1, 2026

Tickets are now on sale for Monet and Venice, an exhibition that will reunite a selection of Claude Monet’s extraordinary Venetian paintings—a radiant yet underexplored chapter in the artist’s late career. The exhibition, New York’s largest museum show dedicated to Monet in over 25 years, will feature more than one hundred artworks, books, and ephemera, including nineteen of Monet’s Venetian paintings. It will mark the first dedicated exploration of Monet’s luminous Venetian works since their debut in 1912, placing them in context with select paintings from key moments throughout his career, and in dialogue with portrayals of the city by artists such as Canaletto, John Singer Sargent, J. M. W. Turner, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The exhibition follows past presentations on the artist at the Brooklyn Museum, such as Monet’s London: Artists‘ Reflections on the Thames, 1859–1914 (2005), Monet and the Mediterranean (1997), and Monet & His Contemporaries (1991). Monet and Venice at the Brooklyn Museum is sponsored by Bank of America.

Organized with the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, and cocurated by Lisa Small, Senior Curator of European Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Melissa Buron, former Director of Curatorial Affairs, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and current Director of Collections and Chief Curator, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity for visitors to experience Monet’s unique vision of the fabled city.

“It’s thrilling to reunite so many of Monet’s radiant paintings of Venice, including Brooklyn’s own Palazzo Ducale, which was acquired in 1920 and is emblematic of the Museum’s trailblazing commitment to modern French art,” said Lisa Small. “Monet found the lagoon city an ideal environment for capturing the evanescent, interconnected effects of colored light and air that define his radical style. In his Venice paintings, magnificent churches and mysterious palaces, all conjured in prismatic touches of paint, dissolve in the shimmering atmosphere like floating apparitions. We’re eager for our visitors to ‘travel’ to Venice and immerse themselves in the unfolding beauty of these dazzling paintings.”

“We’re delighted to present this groundbreaking exhibition offering a fresh opportunity for visitors to engage with one of the world’s most celebrated artists in a bold new way,” said Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director, Brooklyn Museum. “Through thoughtful interpretation and design, we invite our audiences to see Venice through Monet’s eyes and feel inspired by his vision.”

“At Bank of America, we believe that investing in the arts has a positive impact on individuals, families, and communities, and partners like the Brooklyn Museum continue to validate this,” said José Tavarez, President, Bank of America, New York City. “Our long-standing relationship with the Museum continues to deepen connections with innovative programming and compelling experiences. We’re proud to have partnered on conservation projects, free museum programming, and exhibitions and are looking forward to our newest sponsorship of Monet and Venice.”

Although the city was already grappling with the effects of pollution and overtourism when he visited, Monet remarked that Venice was “too beautiful to be painted.” In 1908, encouraged by his wife Alice, who hoped the journey would reinvigorate him during a pivotal moment in his career, Monet reluctantly left Giverny and soon became captivated by Venice’s radiant light and architectural splendor. Often overshadowed by his iconic depictions of the French landscape, Monet’s Venetian works are among the most luminous yet underexplored of his career. The pair had planned to return to Venice years later, but in 1911 Alice fell gravely ill and passed away. In mourning, Monet retreated to his studio, where he completed the Venetian paintings and, in 1912, exhibited them to great acclaim in Paris. These were the last new works shown publicly in his lifetime.

Monet visited Venice only once, yet the city profoundly impacted him. With its fragile beauty and delicate interplay of land and sea, Venice became a site of both formal experimentation and symbolic resonance for the artist. Key examples of Venetian imagery by artists who preceded or were contemporaneous with Monet, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, John Singer Sargent, J. M. W. Turner, James McNeill Whistler, and others, will be showcased, situating Monet’s works within a rich tradition of Venice as a subject of artistic inquiry. Standout works from the Museum’s collection, including four watercolors by Sargent that have been in the collection since 1909, and a group of Whistler’s famous Venice etchings, will be on view. Unlike the bustling scenes painted by artists like Canaletto, Monet’s Venice is almost devoid of human presence. Instead, he focused on rendering the city’s architecture and canals emerging through and dissolving in the encompassing and unifying color and light that he described as the enveloppe.

In addition to Monet’s paintings of Venice, the exhibition will present over a dozen other works created throughout his career that show his lifelong fascination with water and reflection. Paintings from Monet’s time in Normandy, London, and his home in Giverny—including three of his famed water lily canvases from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, a private collection, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco—will be displayed, drawing connections between the artist’s Venetian experiments and his broader oeuvre. Monet’s trip to Venice was his last major international journey, serving as both an interruption and a replenishment of his artistic focus. He returned invigorated, with a new perspective on the water lily paintings created in Giverny. As Monet asserted, “My trip to Venice has had the advantage of making me see my canvases with a better eye.”

The exhibition also features historical ephemera such as guidebooks of Venice and postcards written by Alice to her daughter, including one marking where the couple stayed for part of their trip. Select postcards, photographs, and letters are on loan to the Museum from the collection of Philippe Piguet, Alice Monet’s great-grandson from her first marriage.

Monet and Venice will further engage audiences through multisensory elements, including an original symphonic score inspired by the artist’s Venice paintings by the Brooklyn Museum’s Composer in Residence, Niles Luther. Upon entering the Museum’s fifth-floor rotunda, visitors will be greeted by an immersive installation that captures Venice’s unique atmosphere produced by Brooklyn-based design and technology studio Potion. It features film by Joan Porcel and his Venice-based Joan Porcel Studio, and an ethereal soundscape by Luther, using field recordings he captured in Venice and fragments of melodic themes drawn from his symphony. This visual and aural experience sets the stage for the visitor’s journey through Venice in the subsequent exhibition galleries.

“In composing for this exhibition, I’ve approached the paintings as souvenirs in the way Monet described them—memories infused with both beauty and melancholy,” says Luther. “My process is one of discovery, not invention—uncovering music no one has yet heard. Blending Italian, French, and American traditions, the composition mirrors Monet’s shimmering, dissolving Venice, transforming brushstrokes into living sound that surrounds the listener with both light and longing.”

In the culminating gallery, Luther’s full symphony enters into dialogue with Monet’s paintings of Venice. Three paintings, depicting the Palazzo Dario, the San Giorgio Maggiore, and the Palazzo Ducale, helped inspire and shape the emotional landscape of the composition. Just as Monet sought to render Venice‘s unique atmospheric enveloppe—where light, water, and architecture merge into unified sensory impressions—Luther translates these dissolving effects into an immersive sonic experience, deepening and enriching the visitor’s journey to Venice with Monet. After exiting the exhibition into an educational activity area, visitors will be surrounded by wall murals that depict archival imagesof the re-creation of Venice at Dreamland in Coney Island, linking the borough with the mythologized city.

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue will accompany Monet and Venice, featuring an introduction by Melissa Buron and essays by Lisa Small, Niles Luther, and leading scholars of Impressionism and nineteenth-century art, including André Dombrowski, Donato Esposito, Elena Marchetti, Félicie Faizand de Maupeou, Jonathan Ribner, and Richard Thomson. These contributions explore Monet’s Venice works from sociohistorical and ecocritical perspectives, enriching our understanding of this pivotal moment in the artist’s career.

Tour schedule

Brooklyn Museum, October 10, 2025–February 1, 2026

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, March 21 –July 26, 2026

Credits

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 Buron, Director of Collections and Chief Curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Original symphonic installation by Niles Luther, Composer in Residence at the Brooklyn Museum.

Lead Sponsor

Significant support is provided by the Ford Foundation, Constance Christensen, and Mr. and Mrs. Alan Howard.

About the Brooklyn Museum

For 200 years, the Brooklyn Museum has been recognized as a trailblazer. Through a vast array of exhibitions, public programs, and community-centered initiatives, it continues to broaden the narratives of art, uplift a multitude of voices, and center creative expression within important dialogues of the day. Housed in a landmark building in the heart of Brooklyn, the Museum is home to an astounding encyclopedic collection of more than 140,000 objects representing cultures worldwide and over 6,000 years of history—from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to significant American works, to groundbreaking installations presented in the only feminist art center of its kind. As one of the oldest and largest art museums in the country, the Brooklyn Museum remains committed to innovation, creating compelling experiences for its communities and celebrating the power of art to inspire awe, conversation, and joy.