Richard Parkes Bonington

In a small but distinctive group of paintings, watercolors, and intricate pencil sketches such as this architectural study, the young British artist Richard Parkes Bonington was one of the first artists to depict Venice as a melancholy city—magnificent but tragic given its former imperial glory and current state of decay. Bonington visited Venice for four weeks in the spring of 1826, and his pictures inspired Turner, Ruskin, and generations of later artists to study and appreciate the city’s unique and beautiful details. Bonington’s interest may have been fueled by Lord Byron’s recent praise for Venice in the poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto 4, Stanza 3, 1818):

In Venice, Tasso’s echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear:
Those days are gone—but beauty still is here.
States fall, arts fade—but Nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!