The Grand Canal, Venice (Gondola before San Giorgio)

The Grand Canal, Venice (Gondola before San Giorgio) is an oil-on-panel painting by the French painter Félix Ziem, dated to about 1865 and signed "Ziem" at lower right; it belongs to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts (1955.903).

Ziem first went to Venice in 1841 and returned every year until 1892. In his own time he was known as the painter of Venice: he lived and worked on a hired barge, or topo, and Théophile Gautier wrote that the city was his ideal homeland, painted at every hour of the day. San Giorgio Maggiore, Palladio's church on its island facing the city centre, was one of his recurring motifs. He reused the same ingredients again and again, well-known buildings, big sailing boats and gondolas, changing the arrangement of the boats or the viewpoint. Most of his San Giorgio views look west, putting the dome and campanile at the left; here the church sits at the right, and two other known pictures share this layout with a gondolier steering toward it.

The Clark catalogue reads the scene as evening: salmon tones in the upper sky, purple, yellow and peach along the horizon, a grey-blue dome and deep shadow over the sails and water at right. The handling is sketch-like, with even the church laid in with quick, broad strokes. Dating is approximate because Ziem dated fewer than fifty of his roughly 1,600 paintings; the Clark follows Gérard Fabre's date of about 1865 for a similar view. Vincent van Gogh, who met Ziem in 1886, said he would like to make blues the way Ziem did.

The panel now measures 37.9 × 56.5 cm, enlarged from an original 36.2 × 54.6 cm by later mounting. It passed from the Paris dealer Boussod, Valadon in 1900, under the title Grand Canal effet du soir, to Mrs R. C. Lincoln of Boston, and Robert Sterling Clark bought it from Knoedler on 1 May 1930.