The Doge's Palace, Venice (1826): Art, History and Details

The Doge's Palace, Venice (1826) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Richard Parkes Bonington (British, 1802–1828).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

At the age of 22, Bonington achieved overnight success at the official (state sponsored) Paris exhibition known as Salon. Two years later, in 1826, he journeyed to Venice, a city that had long attracted landscape artists. At first, constant rain greatly depressed Bonington, but suddenly the weather changed and Venice was at its glorious best. Bonington frequently painted outdoors, capturing immediate impressions of Venetian architecture and sunlight. He made this particular study from a boat anchored in the lagoon near the Doge's Palace. The thick swirls of paint, with colors mixed together while still wet, indicates how rapidly the artist worked.

Object facts

• Title: The Doge's Palace, Venice
• Date: 1826
• Creator attribution: Richard Parkes Bonington (British, 1802–1828)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on millboard
• Dimensions: Framed: 53.5 x 61 x 6 cm (21 1/16 x 24 x 2 3/8 in.); Unframed: 35.5 x 42.7 cm (14 x 16 13/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1985.56

A detail from the museum

At age seventeen, Bonington began teaching precision drawing at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and he was essential to bringing aspects of the English style to France.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1985.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 2 (February 1986): 26–71.
• Noon, Patrick J. Richard Parkes Bonington--on the Pleasure of Painting. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 1991.
• D 'Argencourt, Louise and Roger Diederen. The Cleveland Museum of Art: Catalogue of Paintings, Part Four; European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland, OH:The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.