Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner And The Palazzo Barbaro Circle

About this book

At the end of the nineteenth century a remarkable group of artists writers and patrons gathered regularly at the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice Italy. While Venice had long attracted wealthy tourists from across Europe and America a particularly rich expatriate culture flourished at this time. In the 1880s Daniel and Ariana Curtis of Boston purchased and restored the Palazzo Barbaro where they lived in self-imposed exile. The Palazzo eventually became the center of a fascinating circle of American and English personalities living in Venice: the poet Robert Browning; Katharine de Kay Bronson of Newport a writer greatly interested in local Venetian craft; Sir Austen Henry Layard an archaelogist and an important collector of Renaissance paintings. Isabella and John Gardner also of Boston rented the Palazzo Barbaro every other year beginning in 1884. A myriad of fascinating figures such as the painters John Singer Sargent James McNeil Whistler and Claude Monet; the connoisseur Bernh