A biography of the American painter Ralph W. Curtis (1854–1922) of the Boston family who bought the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal in Venice in 1885. After graduating at Harvard, Curtis moved to Paris to study art with Carolus Duran, where he met his distant cousin John S. Sargent, with whom he travelled to Holland to see Frans Hals’s paintings. He exhibited at the Paris salons, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and at the Venice Biennale in the 1880s. At Palazzo Barbaro he met Robert Browning and Henry James as well as Venetian painters such as Ettore Tito and Antonio Mancini. He travelled widely, even to Japan and India. His works can be found in American museums and private collections.
This is a revised and enlarged edition of Ralph W. Curtis: un pittore americano a Venezia. Venice: Supernova Edizioni, 2019.
Contents Acknowledgments List of Illustrations XI Introduction 1 Ralph Wormeley Curtis, the Painter 2 The Beginnings. Boston, Cambridge, Newport 3 Paris and Europe 4 Rome 5 Venice and the Palazzo Barbaro 6 Venice, Whistler and Sargent 7 Venice and the Esposizione Nazionale of 1887 8 Isabella Stewart Gardner 9 Japan and India 10 Marriage and the New Century 11 “The Verdict” by Edith Wharton: The End of a Painter Appendix: Curtis’s Notes on the 1879 Munich Exhibition Ralph Curtis and Venice. The Golden Hours Bibliography Index of Names
Rosella Mamoli Zorzi is a professor emerita of Anglo-American literature at the University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari. She has worked on Venetian painters and American writers. Her most recent publication is The Aspern Papers and Other Tales, edited with Simone Francescato, Cambridge University Press, 2022. Elisabetta Barisoni (Ph.D., 2015) is director of Ca' Pesaro-International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice and a former curator at the MART museum in Rovereto.
