s who have painted in Venice would fill a
book. Not all have been too successful; while some have borne false
witness. The dashing Ziem, for example, deprived Venice of her
translucency; our own Henry Woods and Luke Fildes endow her daughters,
who have always a touch of wistfulness, with too bold a beauty. In
Whistler's lagoon etchings one finds the authentic note and in Clara
Montalba's warm evanescent aquamarines; while for the colour of Venice I
cannot remember anything finer, always after Turner, than, among the
dead, certain J.D. Hardings I have seen, and, among the living, Mr.
Sargent's amazing transcripts, which, I am told, are not to be obtained
for love or money, but fall to the lot of such of his friends as wisely
marry for them as wedding presents, or tumble out of his gondola and
need consolation.

Bonington and Harding painted Venice as it is; Turner used Venice to
serve his own wonderful and glorious ends. If you look at his "Sun of
Venice" in the National Gallery, you will not recognize the fairy
background of spires and domes--more like a city of the Arabian Nights
than the Venice of fact even in the eighteen-thirties. You will notice
too that the great wizard, to whom, in certain rapt moods, accuracy was
nothing, could not even write the word Venezia correctly on the sail of
a ship. Whistler too, in accordance with his dictum that to say to the
artist that he must take nature as she is, is to say to the musician
that he must sit on the piano, used Venice after his own caprice, as the
study of his etchings will show. And yet the result of both these
artists' endeavours--one all for colour and the other all for form--is
by the synthesis of genius a Venice more Venetian than herself: Venice
essentialized and spiritualized.

It was from this bridge that one Sunday morning I watched the very
complete removal of a family from the Giudecca to another domicile in
the city proper. The household effects were all piled up in the one
boat, which father and elder son, a boy of about twelve, propelled.
Mother and baby sat on a mattress, high up, while two ragged girls and
another boy hopped about where they could and shouted with excitement.
As soon as the Rio di S. Trovaso was entered the oarsmen gave up rowing
and clawed their way along the wall. Moving has ever been a delight to
English children, the idea of a change of house being eternally
alluring, but what would they not give to make the exchange of homes
li