James Wilson Morrice

Contents

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Acknowledgements & Dedication Note to the Reader

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Introduction

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Part 1—Setting the Scene

Venice at the End of the Nineteenth and Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries

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The City Tourists and Travellers Venetian Art in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Foreign Artists in Venice at the Time of Morrice’s Visits The Biennale

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Morrice’s Art

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Ways of Looking Ways of Working Exhibitions and Critical Reception of the Venice Work Questions of Identity

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Part 2—Morrice’s Venice

70 84 99 112 130 140 154 166 184 190 200 206 214 236 254 271

The Basilica di San Marco The Piazzetta San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale The Molo San Marco and the Giardini Reali The Riva degli Schiavoni near the Molo Walking Along the Riva degli Schiavoni The Rialto Bridge and the Grand Canal The Riva del Ferro from the Riva del Vin Palazzi Southeast of the Rialto Bridge The Rialto Market The Grand Canal Toward San Marco Campi North of the Accademia Bridge South of the Accademia Bridge Castello and the Public Gardens The Bacino di San Marco and other Waterways Outside the City Epilogue

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Morrice in Venice—Biography

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Select Bibliography Index Institutions and Societies Glossary Author Biography Photo Credits

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Introduction

For almost a decade, James Wilson Morrice (1865–1924) fell under the spell of that ­“Paradise of Cities”—Venice, Italy. Through his eight or so visits from the late nineteenth century until possibly 1909, he made Venice his own and revealed himself as a modern painter of the “Queen of the Adriatic.” Moreover, his pictures reside within the context of the city’s own engagement with modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James Wilson Morrice. Paintings and Drawings of Venice is a close study of the artwork that records his reactions to this extraordinary city and of the ways and means that he deciphered what he saw. This publication explores Morrice’s Venetian canvases, panels, and drawings, all of which represent a rare dedication to Venice by a modern foreign artist, and a Canadian painter especially.

Morrice’s Venetian work is a tribute to his visual engagement with the city and his ability to see the subject on his own terms. There is, however, little certainty about the exact number of times Morrice travelled to Venice from his permanent residence in Paris. There are also questions about how long he stayed, or even where he stayed.

There is little evidence of which foreign or Venetian artists he may have encountered, what artworks he might have seen, or what nearby places he may have visited. We do not know what travel writings on Venice he may have read or to what extent he ­collected postcards and photographs of the city as aides-mémoires when he worked on the ­paintings in his Parisian studio-residence. And we do not know with any certainty why he stopped visiting Venice.

The biographical details of his Venetian voyages are brought together by a few ­sentences in his extant letters, addresses and notes in some of his sketchbooks, and mention of him in the writings of others, including art reviews, letters, diaries, and public talks. While such archival materials further the narrative, it is Morrice’s paintings and drawings that most expressively document his time in Venice. There are currently over one hundred and fifteen known Venetian pictures, and they are second only to Paris in the number of his urban images. Other Venice works are likely hidden in ­private collections across the world, and some images may not have been correctly identified as pictures of Venice. Also it is possible that other Venetian paintings of his may have been lost, overpainted, or even destroyed. It is known that certain Venice canvases have been cut down and exist as incomplete images; others may have followed suit. His extant carnets (sketchbooks) and loose drawings from others include over one hundred ­Venetian images. More drawings may emerge from the dismantled Venice sketchbook dating around 1894, owned by the Right Honourable Vincent Massey and the Toronto art dealer Blair Laing, or as other lost sketchbooks are discovered—in whole or in part.

In this publication, the discussion of Morrice’s Venetian pictures is organized around the places he painted—beginning at the Basilica di San Marco (St. Mark’s Basilica) and its environs, moving toward the Ponte di Rialto (Rialto Bridge), the Canalazzo (Grand Canal), the Giardini Pubblici (Public Gardens), the Venetian Lagoon, and the Lido, then ending at the city of Padua (Padova). While studies of an artist’s work often unfold chronologically, there are particular difficulties with Morrice’s pictures. They are all undated by him, and the technical experiments in his painting process do not follow an obvious order of making. When there is both a panel and canvas, or a drawing and

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<< 3 Wm. Notman & Son. James Wilson Morrice, Montreal, QC 1900. Silver salts on glass, gelatin silver process, 17.8 × 12.7 cm. McCord Stewart Museum. Purchase, funds graciously donated by Maclean’s magazine, the Maxwell Cummings Family Foundation, and Empire-Universal Films Ltd. (II-132337)

Venice at the End of the Nineteenth and Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries The City According to legend, Venice was founded at noon on 25 March, the day of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, and in the year 421, when the foundations were laid for the church of San Giacometto di Rialto. There are traces of habitation in the islands of the Venetian Lagoon around that time, and the same is true of the Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square) a century later. By the first decade of the ninth century, Venice was a nascent city that included surrounding settlements. The prominence of Vinegia, to use its archaic name, was secured when St. Mark’s body was brought from Alexandria, Egypt, in 829 and the construction of the Basilica di San Marco began. The city that James Wilson Morrice encountered at the end of the nineteenth century was remarkably similar in appearance to the Venice of the Renaissance, four hundred years earlier. M ­ orrice’s Venice was familiar even to those who had never gone to Italy, and Venetian souvenirs and trinkets were popular with armchair travellers. A likely mid-nineteenth-century view of the area at the Basilica di San Marco by the Dutch-Canadian painter Cornelius Krieghoff in the Power Corporation of Canada’s art collection is only one example of the innumerable images painted after colour lithographs rather than by artists who had seen the real thing. As the Anglo-American writer Henry James stated sardonically in his Italian Hours: “Venice has been painted and described many ­thousands of times, and of all the cities of the world is easiest to visit without going there.” While its population around 1900 was only one hundred and fifty thousand compared to nearly three million in Paris, Venice was very much the Paradise of Cities in the international imagination.

The exoticism of a city set on water and the grandeur of its decaying architecture were largely responsible for the “lure of Venice” that continues to the present day. There is also another aspect of the city’s identity which is part of its exceptionalism and ­attraction.

Since its early history, the city was both European and Eastern, with one part of its ­culture set within the Catholic Latin West, the other tied to both Muslim and ­eastern Orthodox traditions through trade and politics. Venetian architecture is rooted in ­Byzantine and Islamic styles, exemplified by its earliest churches and remnants of its ancient palazzi, the substantial buildings that historically were the principal ­residences of noble Venetian families. This East–West duality of Venice was further manifested in its double identity as an ancient and modern city. Defining Venice in the nineteenth century was a persistent cause of the tensions between the past and present for its ­citizens, and between Venetians and foreigners. In effect, the Venice that Morrice encountered was two cities: a nostalgic, anti-modern place lost in time, and a dynamic, authentic space trying to adapt to the progressive ideals of modernity. The dichotomy was also inherent in the physical uniqueness of the city—the tension between stone and water, the solidity of the streets and the transparency of sea and sky, a place submerged but also floating

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4 Piazza San Marco, in Ferdinando Ongania, ed., Calli e Canali in Venezia, 1891, with photographs by Studio Naya and Tomaso Filippi

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71 James Wilson Morrice. Scene in Venice, San Giorgio Maggiore Church c.1906. Oil on canvas, 55.9 × 48.3 cm. The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGOID.103733/ PCO133)

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80 James Wilson Morrice.

Riva degli Schiavoni c.1904.

Oil on panel, 12.7 × 15.2 cm.

The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGOID.106769/PM09)

Morrice extends his view of the promenade in the panel Riva degli Schiavoni, Venice (fig. 80), from the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Thomson Collection. At the centre of his glance at the Molo are three popolani shown in different degrees of profile. In his other Venetian images, the few male figures are usually gondoliers, but the tall man here has no obvious occupation. The two women are also not his usual, black-shawled elegant creatures but are more realistic popolane, the centre figure wearing the red cap of girls from the countryside. Simply dressed in many of the same low tonalities as the pavement, the figures meld with their surroundings despite their prominent placement. Although the image suggests a momentary glimpse of the eye, the three figures are in no hurry to end their conversation as they illustrate Henry James’ comment: “Venice is emphatically the city of conversation; people talk all over the place because there is nothing to ­interfere with its being caught by the ear. … Venetian life [is] a long conversazione.”

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Morrice has seated three figures to their right, likely tourists, who stare at the Bacino like every mesmerized visitor then and now. Again, an off-centre lamppost divides the image and pierces the sky at the same time it unites his three-banded composition. A heavily shawled popolana secures the left side of the painting, ending the long loop of figures. Morrice has also given the Bacino a tightly rounded shape, which is largely an optical illusion when the long Riva degli Schiavoni is seen from the Molo. The water’s rich colour mirrors some of the tonalities in his late-afternoon sky, as the effects of ­climatic light are on show once more. Docked boats, a nearby barge, and the buildings toward the Public Gardens and beyond are constructed from broad brush strokes that mark rather than detail the site. By suggesting that the Bacino is elliptically shaped and that the distant Lido island is joined to the city, he limited his vista and added to the intimacy of the view, where Morrice’s rubbed colour smolders like summer air.

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81 James Wilson Morrice.

Salute, Venice [Riva degli Schiavoni] c.1901. Oil on wood, 12.4 × 15.6 cm. The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGOID.103761/ PC0194)

95 James Wilson Morrice.

Figures on a Venetian Terrace [Riva degli Schiavoni] c.1901–02. Oil on panel, 12.3 × 15.3 cm. Art Gallery of Alberta Collection, Edmonton.

Gift of the David Morrice Estate, 1979 (79.11.1)

scale and zigzag play of enclosed and open spaces, mediated by the figures, furniture, and central lamppost. The solitary figure in the pink shirt is a direct foil for Pennell, as Morrice varied their degree of profile and the object(s) of their attention, while each dominates the space he inhabits. To this uneventful narrative, he added an undercurrent of restlessness in the empty centre as it plays against the crowded edges of the panel and the diagonal axes laid over his planar grid.

People seated around a café table, a familiar theme in Morrice’s work in Venice or ­wherever he finds himself, is the subject of Figures on a Venetian Terrace (fig. 95), a panel at the Art Gallery of Alberta. His visitors are again near the Hotel Metropole, adjacent

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to the Ospedale della Pietà, the children’s home and convent where the composer ­Vivaldi worked. Morrice’s proximity to the group of café-goers is almost measurable, even if he had manipulated the space of the Bacino and San Giorgio Maggiore for the sake of the picture. Turning her back to Morrice, one female figure is a foil to her ­companions as their dark clothes contrast with her own pale costume. Once again Morrice humorously linked figures and architecture, as her upper body resembles the distant church dome. In addition, he turned each figure almost in unison with the angle of the objects directly behind them, which further plots the contrived space of the panel. The open pavement of the Riva degli Schiavoni emphasizes the typical string of tables and chairs along the promenade. The dark street that occupies a third of the space soon gives way to a glowing sunset that takes over the rest of the panel.

Alongside the Chioggia barca with its red-tipped sails is the church of San Giorgio, its white marble military marina and lighthouse to the left and its burnt sienna ­campanile almost at the centre of the panel. The shadow on the bell tower suggests late afternoon, while Morrice’s quick brush marks radiate the relentless summer heat. An MMFA ­drawing (fig. 96) of San Giorgio from near the Hotel Metropole gives a view of the dome and bell tower, and a sheet in the NGC sketchbook includes Morrice’s notes on the colours of the campanile. The panel’s glistening pink, white, ochre, black, orange, and blue tones define Morrice’s visceral reaction to Venice and illustrate Henry James’s appraisal in his 1888 novel The Aspern Papers: “See how it glows with the advancing summer; how the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of the palaces all ­shimmer and melt together.”

96 James Wilson Morrice.

The Island of San Giorgio Seen from the Riva degli Schiavoni, Venice. Sketchbook No. 1, fol. 10r, c.1901–03. Graphite, 10.5 × 16.6 cm. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. David R. Morrice Bequest (Dr.1981.8)

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Walking along the Riva degli Schiavoni

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1 Bacino di San Marco 2 Salute Church 3 Customs House / Dogana 4 Redentore Church 5 Giudecca Island 6 Le Zitelle 7 San Giorgio Maggiore Church

The Riva degli Schiavoni had been a popular promenade since its enlargement in the late 1790s, when its new hotels and cafés became a symbol of modern, international ­Venice. Morrice’s paintings of walking along the Riva are frontal views, and his pedestrians are usually popolane. Arthur Symons, in his 1907 Cities of Italy, remarked that Venetian women “without exception, walk splendidly, not taking little mincing feminine steps, but with a fine, grave stride,” which he believed was due in part to their heel-less slippers. His comment that “they use the whole body in walking … with the whole back and shoulders in the exact swing of the stride” is borne out in Morrice’s images. In a city like Venice, with no vehicular transport except on the canals, the image of a walking figure is to be expected, but it had also become part of modernism’s visual vocabulary.

In the latter nineteenth century, the theme of walking in the city was seen as a way of experiencing the world, either actively engaging with urban life or becoming lost within oneself. Whether Morrice’s Venetian figures were engaged in leisurely or purposeful walking is implied by the pose of the body and its position in the picture.

The popolane’s integration with the physical space of the Riva is a sign of both their place in modern Venice and their timeless separation from Morrice and the world of foreigners. Morrice easily transferred his walking women from the Piazzetta to the Riva degli Schiavoni, and the bodies of his popolane are again draped in scialle (shawls) and showing a hint of their multicoloured skirts. By widening the shawl and skirt at the ankle, he hastened the sensation of motion as the women make their way along the Riva.

At the same time, Morrice’s emphasis on the silhouette slows down their movement and heightens the aura of stillness and silence. In most instances, his female figure is shown in full profile or with a slight turn of the body and is positioned against bands of ­pavement, water, and sky. Morrice gives no hint of where she is going or what she is thinking, but such ambiguity and vagueness is a fundamental means of narration in modernist art.

A panel in the National Gallery of Canada, simply titled Venice (fig. 97), shows two women walking toward Morrice, who was likely seated at a table on his way to the ­Public Gardens. The time is early evening, and the low-toned colour and delicate drawing enrich the tranquil mood as Venice draws in on itself. Morrice is more interested in the vignette created by the women than the wider setting of the pochade. His discrete scaling of figures and objects, and their subtle silhouettes turn the foreground into its own picture. The woman in a billowy pink costume is either a wealthy traveller or a privileged Venetian attended by a sombrely dressed older popolana. Clothing for ­affluent women has long been international and is not indicative of one fashionable city over another. The differences in the size of their bodies and their costume define their status, but walking almost side by side suggests companionship. The women may have just alighted from an excursion in the docked gondola with its white-and-red striped ­summer canopy, or tendalino. Their movement from the water to the sidewalk is both an exotic and an everyday Venetian experience, and the gondolier with his raised oar is part of

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97 James Wilson Morrice.

Venice [Riva degli Schiavoni] 1901. Oil on wood, 12.2 × 15.3 cm. National Gallery of Canada. Gift of G. Blair Laing, Toronto, 1989 (30478)

98 James Wilson Morrice.

Lamppost and Balustrade. Study for “Venice” 1901. Graphite on wove paper, 10.6 × 16.7 cm.

National Gallery of Canada.

Purchased 1936 (7419.18r)

this process. The open space of the promenade, the breadth of the water, and the ­distance between the painter and his subject suggest that Morrice was initially working from the café at the Metropole or the nearby Hotel Londra. A gondola stand and a ferry service to the lagoon islands from the Londra made this section of the Riva a busy­ tourist stop.

The wide landing and its curved water steps are actually bound on either side by long balustrades and tall lights, part of the row of railings and lampposts that ran along the Bacino di San Marco from the Public Gardens to the Royal Gardens. The lighting here and in the NGC drawing Lamppost and Balustrade. Study for “Venice” (fig. 98) again refers to modern Venice while the gondola speaks to its past. The lamppost both divides the foreground and links the three sections of the painting as it did in his pictures of the Molo. While it vaguely echoes the shape of the two women, the lamp also slows down their pace and determines their place. Pentimenti reveal that Morrice altered the background at some point after the initial completion of the panel. To make the Bacino accord with its actual size, he changed his viewpoint and moved San Giorgio Maggiore’s campanile, perhaps even twice. In a related MMFA drawing, San Giorgio’s dome is closer and the main façade more simplified.

Buildings on the distant Giudecca have become no more than thin swipes of paint in the panel, although he replicates the optical illusion of the island as a ­continuation of the eastern tip of Venice and the Lido.

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108 James Wilson Morrice.

Rialto Bridge, Venice c.1897.

Oil on panel, 18.1 × 25 cm.

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

F. Eleanore Morrice Bequest (1981.54)

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The Grand Canal toward San Marco

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1 Pal. Mocenigo 2 Pal. Contarini 3 Pal. Grassi 4 Accademia Bridge 5 Pal. Barbaro-Curtis 6 Pal. Dario 7 Salute Church 8 Hotel Gritti 9 Pal. Ferro Fini

Dorothy Menpes, the daughter of the painter Mortimer Menpes, wrote in their 1904 book Venice that the Grand Canal “is to Venice what the Strand is to London and the Rue St. Honoré is to Paris. It is the most wonderful street in the world.” Continuing down the Grand Canal from Rialto to San Marco (fig. 146), Morrice looked at palazzi along the water’s edge as “objects of nature, but of a nature which seemed to have created its works with a human imagination,” as Marcel Proust wrote in Sweet Cheat Gone. Although not without its critics and detractors, luxury hotels and fashionable restaurants had sprung up along the pedestrian routes from the Accademia Bridge toward San Marco, similar to the development of the Riva degli Schiavoni. One particular symbol of modern mercantile Venice was the promenade XXII Marzo, southwest of the Piazza San Marco and opened in 1880. The wide thoroughfare was lined by the Stock Exchange, the Chamber of ­Commerce, the headquarters of several banks and shipping companies, new hotels ­created from private palazzi, and high-end shops. Also catering to foreigners was Emilio Aickelin’s photography and art supplies shop, where Morrice purchased wood panels and likely other painting equipment and perhaps postcards of Venice.

An unusual view of the Grand Canal approximately halfway between the Rialto and Accademia Bridges shows the finish line of the Regatta Storica, held since 1841 on the first Sunday in September and still celebrated today. However, Venice, Regatta (fig. 145) completely denies the modernist ways and means by which Morrice customarily saw

145 James Wilson Morrice.

Venice, Regatta [Grand Canal] c.1900. Oil on canvas, 51.4 × 74.6 cm. Private collection

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the city. The large canvas in a private collection is dominated by a long stretch of the Canalazzo in the direction of the Rialto Bridge, lined by palazzi along both banks. At the right, people in small boats and sleek racing gondolini gather in front of the pink Ca’ Mocenigo Vecchia, the white Palazzo Contarini delle Figure, and lastly the Palazzo ­Erizzo-Nani-Mocenigo. On the left, crowds of spectators congregate near the (hidden) grandstand at Ca’ Foscari, now the main building of the eponymous university. The narrative of a specific event, a view looking along rather than across the Grand Canal, the plethora of people and palazzi, and a low viewpoint suggesting he was working from a boat in the water are all motifs that are not found in other of Morrice’s known ­paintings of Venice. Nor are there any other images of a Venetian regatta amongst his documented artwork.

The painting, it turns out, was based almost entirely on a black-and-white illustration by the Roman artist Dante Paolocci for an article on the Regatta Storica (aimed at ­tourists) and another long-standing boat race between two rival groups of popolani and was more important to veneziani than stranieri. The image was published in the 18 August 1895 issue of the popular magazine L’Illustrazione Italiana, which Morrice could have purchased from the bookstalls that lined the Quai des Grands-Augustins where he lived and worked in Paris, or he may have acquired the periodical by other means. The ­primary import of Morrice’s painting, however, is his ability to transform a small blackand-white commercial engraving into a rich and cohesive painting. Even if he had appropriated the illustration, the canvas exemplifies his approach to form as colour and light. His alignment of solids and voids creates the rhythms of a picture, and the ­language

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146 Grand Canal from the Accademia 1890–99. Albumen photographic print, 30.8 × 43.9 cm.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC

147 James Wilson Morrice.

The Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal, Venice 1901. Graphite on wove paper, 21.2 × 16.7 cm.

National Gallery of Canada.

Purchased 1936 (7419.45v-46)

of his brush marks differentiates the substance and texture of the objects in the image. His ability to produce such a bold painting from a small illustration derived from the knowledge gained from his constant drawing regardless of the subject and from his honed ability to move from the intimate dimensions of a panel to the demands of a large canvas.

Attempting to decipher whatever prompted Morrice to appropriate this particular illustration for a canvas would only be conjecture. Certainly, he made major changes to the well-dressed spectators, thinning out the crowd near Ca’ Foscari and inserting, among other things, women carrying parasols that he could have borrowed from his own paintings and drawings. He also widened the Canalazzo, giving the gondolas more room to manoeuvre than occurs in the original black-and-white photo-engraving.

Importantly, the painting includes the right half of the Palazzo Contarini delle Figure and part of the Palazzo Erizzo-Nani-Mocenigo, which are not present in L’Illustrazione Italiana, suggesting that Morrice might have used other images to accurately record the architectural details. Morrice may have been aware of Rubens Santoro’s turn-of the-­ century paintings of those palazzi in his Grand Canal panoramas, as well as coloured postcards. Nevertheless, the colours of the buildings’ façades are correct and, as happens in Venice, the same as they are today.

It is more than possible that during one of his trips to Venice, Morrice made now lost drawings of the palazzi, or even painted an unknown pochade of the regatta site. There

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is a rapid drawing in a private collection of the Mocenigo Casa Nuova, the building to the left of the pink palazzo (see fig. 129). He certainly made a detailed drawing in the Massey–Laing sketchbook of the Palazzo Grassi (fig. 147), a mid-eighteenth-century building only a few palazzi south of the Nani-Mocenigo. Working across the Canalazzo, perhaps from the entrance to the Ca’ Rezzonico, he adds notes on the colours of the flag on what was then the Hotel Imperator d’Austria, the cloth on the piano nobile, and the mooring poles. The Regatta canvas was likely painted at the turn of the century; ­however, its heavy dependence on the magazine illustration and the painting’s contradictions of Morrice’s modernist approach to Venice places the work outside his true Venetian ­pictures. On the other hand, the canvas might well have been the impetus for Morrice to soon paint his first regatta images in Saint-Malo and other seaside resorts in northern France.

A number of palazzi along this stretch of the Grand Canal were purchased as homes by foreigners, and the area had become decidedly international in style and spirit. A prime example is recorded in MMFA sketchbook No. 16; the precisely drawn Palazzo Barbaro-­ Curtis, Venice (fig. 148), close to the Accademia Bridge, combines the Gothic-Renaissance portion acquired by the Barbaro family in 1465 and the Baroque structure their heirs commissioned in the 1690s. In 1885, the second piano nobile and upper floors were ­purchased by Ariana and Daniel Curtis of Boston, and their famed circle included their cousin John Singer Sargent, Robert Browning, Henry James, James McNeill Whistler,

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148 James Wilson Morrice.

Palazzo Barbaro-Curtis, Venice.

Sketchbook No. 16, fol. 3r, c.1904–06. Graphite, 10.6 × 16.7 cm. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Gift of David R. Morrice (Dr.1973.39.3)

210 Sergei Prokudin-Gorski.

Arcade of the Ducal Palace, Venice 1905–15. Photographic print, 8 × 8 cm. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC