Venetian Scene

Provenance

Private collection, Worcestershire, England

Sale, Christie’s, London, South Kensington, England, January 24, 2008, lot 0114, from above (as Vessels Before Venice at Dusk)

Private collection, New York, New York

Sale, Roland Auctions, Glen Cove, New York, January 28, 2022, lot 0237, from above

Related Works

Santa Maria della Salute, Sunset, 1870–85, oil on canvas, 23 x 36 inches; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

Venice I, ca. 1875, oil on canvas, 23½ x 48½ inches; Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan

Grand Canal Venice, 1882, oil on canvas, 22⅞ x 35⅞ inches; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia

Note

This painting has been authenticated by Andrea Henderson Fahnestock, who described the composition, saying:

His Venice paintings and watercolors are very much theme-and-variation. This one pictures the city’s famous architectural monuments on the far horizon, the “butterfly boats” that all artists painted at the right, and what appears to be a bit of the public garden at the far right edge._[1]

Haseltine’s first recorded trip to Venice was in 1871, at which time a news correspondent in Rome commented upon his return:

Haseltine has brought from Venice some of the loveliest studies of the Venetian ‘butterfly boats,’ as Ruskin calls them, I ever saw. We all know how Haseltine paints water; what a poetry he throws into shores and sea, such a liquid sheen, such comprehension of nature’s language of colors, and such a nice executive sense as he has…. Now he will add to his fame by some of the loveliest Venetian lagoon and Adriatic scenes ever artist painted._[2]

1. Andrea Henderson Fahnestock, “Water-Rambles” on the Lagoon: William Stanley Haseltine in Venice,” American Art Review V, no. 2 (Winter 1993), 154–165.

2. Anne Brewster, “Our Letter from Rome,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, December 9, 1871, quoted in Andrea Henderson Fahnestock, “Water-Rambles,” 164, n19.