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an image of a painting of a room with chairs and a tablea painting of an old wooden frame with a label on it
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3 - RALPH RANDOLF LATIMER
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Estimate €3,000 - €5,000
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Description
RALPH RANDOLF LATIMER Baltimore, 1862 – Venice, 1931 The Library at Palazzo Barbaro Oil on canvas, 70 × 86 cm The library, situated above the piano nobile of Palazzo Barbaro, is one of the most evocative rooms in the Curtis family’s Venetian residence. Family memory links it inextricably to Henry James; it was here that, in the summer of 1892, Isabella Stewart Gardner, finding the house full of guests, had a bed set up for the writer from which he could gaze upon the ceiling adorned with stucco work and medallions – as also attested by a period photograph now held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The experience must have left a particularly vivid impression on James, for on 10 July of that year he wrote to Ariana Curtis, from Palazzo Barbaro itself, that anyone who had not admired those very arabesques from their own bed, in the rosy light of dawn or during an afternoon siesta, ‘one simply does not know the Barbaro.’ The library also held a special place in the memories of other distinguished visitors to the palace; Robert Browning, on visiting it on 28 November 1888, noted with satisfaction that it had remained ‘intact, apart from the books’. It was precisely from the library window, overlooking the fondamenta towards Campo Santo Stefano, that Ralph Wormeley Curtis painted a view of the city. It is the same window from which, as Henry James recalls in *The Grand Canal* (1892), the voices of children playing in the square below could be heard. In the painting by Latimer, who himself lived in those rooms for over a decade, the library is depicted with the same sensitivity shown to the palace’s other interiors, capturing on canvas a place that Henry James’s writing had already consigned to the literary history of Palazzo Barbaro. Bibliography: ‘Gondola Days’: Isabella Stewart Gardner and her world at Palazzo Barbaro-Curtis, exhibition catalogue edited by R. Mamoli Zorzi, Venice 2004, p. 101
See original version (Italian)
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About the sale FROM THE CURTIS COLLECTIONS AT PALAZZO BARBARO: PAINTINGS, FURNITURE AND WORKS OF ART
Auction location
Auction time 09/29/2026 at 2:45 PM
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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