An American Painter in Venice

Book excerpt: 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 Franz Hals’s paintings. He exhibited at the Paris salons, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, at the Venice Biennale in the 1880s. At Palazzo Barbaro he met Robert Browning, Henry James, but also Venetian painters such as Ettore Tito and Antonio Mancini. He travelled widely, even to Japan and India. His works are in American Museums and private collections.