Corner of one of the new Monet suites at the St. Regis Venice
In October 1908, Claude Monet traveled to Venice for the first and only time in his life. He did it accompanied by his second wife Alice and invited by the eccentric Mrs. Mary Young Hunter, an influential Edwardian socialite and art patron of the close circle of John Singer Sargent and Rodin. The couple stayed first for a couple of weeks in the palazzo that Mrs. Hunter was renting, before moving to the Grand Hotel Britannia, the most elegant on the Grand Canal and the first to have electric lighting in all its rooms, where they extended their stay in the city for another six weeks.
According to his biographers, Monet had never been interested in Venice in the slightest, it was a too trite destination for the artists of the time, but as often happens when you travel without expectations, the city was a real discovery for the painter and one of the places that marked him the most in his career.
View of the Grand Canal from one of the landscaped terraces of the St. Regis Venice
During the eight weeks he spent in Venice that fall of 1908, Monet produced 37 paintings in which he portrayed the city from a dozen angles, very close to each other, at different times of the day and always empty. The neoclassical basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, the gothic facade of the Doge's Palace, the baroque church of Santa Maria della Salute –on which he painted six paintings–, the Palazzo Dario, the Palazzo Contarini, the Palazzo da Mula… And although, as the author himself recognized at the time, those canvases were only “rehearsals and beginnings, sketches that will mean nothing more than memories for me”, over time they became some of his most representative masterpieces, like the famous Twilight in Venice, today exhibited at the Bridgestone Museum in Tokyo.
Many of these 37 canvases were made from the balconies of his suite at the Grand Hotel Britannia, where every evening, at sunset, after having spent the whole day working in the street with his easel, Monet could be seen painting obsessively, trying capture the ephemeral magic of light.
Bespoke furniture, commissioned artwork and lots of light in the Monet Suites at the St Regis
Located at the mouth of the Grand Canal, two steps from the Gran Teatro La Fenice and a four-minute walk from Piazza San Marco, the Grand Hotel Britannia, opened in 1895 for the first Biennale, was transformed over time into the Hotel Europa & Regina and, since last autumn, after two years of intense reform and an extension in which two of the neighboring palaces have been annexed, lives a new reincarnation under the name of St. Regis Venice, a hotel designed to experience the privilege of being in Venice.
The Monet suites are intended to be used as artists' residences
Today, 102 years after that trip, the St. Regis Venice has just introduced the most special suites of him as part of the last phase of the hotel's renovation.
Designed as residencies for contemporary artists and full of dividing mirrors that amplify the view and the beauty of the exterior, the four Monet suites overlook the Grand Canal from the Juliette balconies on the first and second floors of Palazzo Tiepolo and, as he explains the British curator Robin Greene, Art Curator of the St.Regis Venice, “They celebrate not only the importance of Venice in the history of art and the location of the hotel as muse and inspiration of artists but, more specifically, the importance that the six weeks he spent in the hotel painting from the terrace of his suite had on Monet's work”. Robin Greene has been commissioned to create a collection of contemporary art that is unique in the world and shows the city from a perspective never seen before. “Each and every one of the works of art and accessories that we see scattered throughout the hotel represent the DNA of Venice, but from an updated interpretation”, Greene declares.
Detail of one of the hotel bars
Thus, the Monet suites exhibit a series of contemporary works of art created specifically for these spaces by such prominent artists as the French painter Olivier Masmonteil , the American sculptor Karen La Monte – hers is also the life-size sculpture that welcomes guests entering the hotel from the Grand Canal – or the Italian sculptor Massimiliano Pelletti, in addition to a series of glass ornaments made by master Adriano Berengo and his Berengo Studios, with which the St. Regis Venice collaborates in the Glasstress project, which can only be seen in these suites.
For Olivier Masmonteil, the first artist in residence invited by the hotel, any pictorial creation process is summed up in “light, perspective and how to create that light. Thus, you have pictures that give the feeling that you are looking at a wall and others that seem to be looking through a window. In this case, to make this series of five paintings for the Monet suites, I opted for a balance between the two, between wall and window, and how to create that light with color and that color with light”.
Exterior view of the St. Regis Venice, which occupies five adjoining palazzo
handmade furniture inspired by the curves of gondolas, the fabrics made to measure following patterns inspired by the textures of the Doge's Palace and the pavements of the San Giorgio cemetery, ceilings that reflect the flow of water from the canal… The decoration of the suites, as well as the exquisite contemporary reinterpretation of the entire hotel, has been carried out by the Sagrada London Studio, whose main objective has been, according to its director Richard Saunders, “bring the exterior light inside the rooms”, in addition to “creating the relationship between the place, art, culture and hotel design through a color palette that focuses on three tones: dawn, dusk and darkness”. If Monet were to return to Venice today, he would surely stay in his suite with views of the Grand Canal again.
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