Venice

That burnt-orange sail is the one thing in this picture with any real color, and it does a lot of work. Everything else, the masts of the tall ship, the domes of Santa Maria della Salute rising behind, the distant shoreline, has been thinned down to pale blues and grays that barely separate from the paper. Thomas Moran painted this in watercolor, letting wet washes bleed into each other so that the city seems to be dissolving in haze. Down in the lower left, a lone figure poles a tiny boat across water so still it reads as an empty sheet of white.

Moran is better known for something else entirely: the enormous, thunderous canvases of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon that helped convince Congress to protect those places. But he first made his name copying J.M.W. Turner, and Venice was Turner's territory. Moran finally visited in 1886 and returned again and again, producing dozens of these lagoon scenes over the rest of his life. They sold well, which is part of why there are so many. This one is a modest example rather than a showpiece, more of a mood than a view, but it shows what drew him back: a city where the architecture, the boats, and the weather all blur into the same wet light.