Le Palais Ducal

The Impressionist work is painted with dappled brushstrokes in a bright palette of pinks, yellows and blues, bathed in a warm light.

The upper part depicts the pink and white diamond patterned stonework of the Venetian Gothic palace walls pierced by arched windows with colonnaded arcades on the lower two floors, the blue sky above, the Lion of Venice column in the Piazzetta di San Marco to the left, and Ponte della Paglia and the New Prison (Prigioni Nuove) building to the right.

He continued to work on many of his Venetian paintings when he returned home to Giverny, until they were shown in a critically acclaimed exhibition at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in May 1912.

Emden, a Jewish department store owner, was persecuted by the Nazis in the 1930s, and some of his artworks were sold in unclear circumstances via Swiss dealers.

It was sold via Thannhauser Galleries to the German textile merchant and art collector Erich Goeritz [de] in 1926, and was held mainly in England after he emigrated in the 1930s.

This collector later turned out to be the German billionaire Hasso Plattner, founder of the new Museum Barberini, a reconstructed palace in a neo-baroque style which opened in 2017 in Potsdam, built to house his newly acquired collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist French paintings.