Claude Monet’s preponderant role in the development of Impressionism tends to overshadow the fact that his views of Venice, made in the first decade of the twentieth century, were directly contemporaneous with one of the most crucial moments in the history of Modernism: Pablo Picasso’s passage to Cubism in 1907–08. Similarly, it is easy to forget that Monet’s Venetian paintings succeeded by just a couple of years the full-fledged explosion of colors that took place at the hands of André Derain, Henri Matisse, and Maurice de Vlaminck during their short-lived Fauve episode in 1905–06. Arguably, Monet’s high-pitched and color-saturated views of Venice owe more to Derain’s paintings of London of 1905–06 (such as Big Ben, 1905, Musée d’art Moderne de Troyes) than to his own early Impressionist scenes of that city, made in 1870–71. Reciprocally, these paintings by Derain had been prompted by Monet’s views of the Thames, begun in 1899 and exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1904. These mutual interactions, which paved the way toward the series of views of Venice, situate Monet’s artistic production at the dawn of the twentieth century within a broad Modernist canon—rather than in a languishing and aging Impressionist idiom.