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The Grand Canal, Venice Signed; titled on the reverse Oil on board: 20 x 30 in / 50.8 x 76.2 cm Frame size: 27 x 37 in / 68.6 x 94 cm Provenance: Kennedy Gallery, New York Private collection, USA
This sparkling view shows the sweep of the Grand Canal from the Accademia Bridge, the ‘temporary’ wooden bridge built in the 1930s to replace a nineteenth century iron bridge that was too small for the modern vaporetti. On the left is the fifteenth century Palazzo Barbaro, bought by the Bostonian Daniel Curtis in the 1880s and still owned by the family. Among the visitors to Palazzo Barbaro were Robert Browning, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet and Henry James, who used it as a setting for his novel The Wings of the Dove. Catching the sunlight in the distance are the baroque curves of Santa Maria della Salute, Baldassare Longhena’s masterpiece, built in thanksgiving for the Virgin’s deliverance of Venice from the plague of 1630.