Maurice Prendergast came to Venice with a talent for color. He was praised for his "finely disciplined sense of pure and brilliant color, subordinated to a vivacious and accurate style of depiction." Once arriving in Venice he immersed himself in the culture and explored his surroundings. He studied and began to appreciate the old Venitian masters like Tintoretto and Carpaccio. This paired with the new renovation of the Accademia, which had just been repainted, rehung and re-lit in 1989, gave Prendergast the resources he needed to develop his own style and technical approach to painting. An article that was published in 1897 in the widely read American art journal The International Studio provided useful insights into Venitian techniques for any artist seeking to adapt them to his or her own work. "Within the series of watercolors from Prendergasts trip to Italy, a large number of unfinished works have survived...In these we see echoes of the techniques described in the International Studio article, which became common knowledge among those interested in learning the Venitian style’ (N. Mowll Matthews, Prendergast in Italy, exh. cat., Williamstown, Massachusetts, Williams College, 2009, p. 52).

Canal, Venice is a view from the Riva degli Schiavoni across the bacino which shows the churches of the Zitelle to the left and the Redentore the right (C. Clark, et al., Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1989, p. 379). Prendergast often liked to lay his compositions out in a horizontal manner as he does here with Canal, Venice. His flattened forms along with his geometric blocks of color creates a harmonious balance between the figures in the fore ground the boats passing through the canal and the group of pallazzi positioned in the background. The "Kingdom of Italy" flag positioned to the upper left of the picture plane is balanced by the silhouette of Piazza San Marco in the distant, right hand corner of the composition. With Canal, Venice we see the busy happenings of daily life as well as a serene snapshot of the canal and its significance to Venetian life and culture.