Stay in your lane, or merge? “I will not go to Venice,” Claude Monet liked to promise. His dealer had always urged him to try it, saying the paintings would sell back in Paris. But at 68 the most famous painter in France was sticking shrewdly to his territory, a triangle of Normandy stretching down through Rouen to the ornamental water garden he kept northwest of Paris.

When his wife, Alice Hoschedé, insisted her husband forget his trials with “endless water lilies” and accept an invitation to stay free of charge in the floating city, Monet agreed, on an off-duty sort of basis.

They arrived on Oct. 1, 1908, and hired gondolas down the Grand Canal. “I’m too old to paint such beautiful things,” he assured her. They admired the Tintorettos at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. They cupped handfuls of birdseed for the pigeons at Saint Mark’s Basilica. Someone snapped a picture of them there, Claude and Alice, arms outstretched and covered in birds. The couple have that look of tourist obligation, dutiful, a little silly, tired. A bird perches on Monet’s cap.

Then the dam broke. By Oct. 9 he was putting in 10-hour days on the water in two-hour shifts, shivering at the easel until December, resulting in 37 paintings. What changed?

If you judge by the 19 paintings the Brooklyn Museum has reunited for the lush and greedy “Monet and Venice,” the largest survey of this detour in Monet’s late career since Galerie Bernheim-Jeune’s “Venise” exhibition scattered these works to collectors in 1912, you’ll see that what grabbed him were the special density of the light there and the dreamlike supremacy of water. How could they not?

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