James Wilson Morrice painted Venice as a series of moments and glimpses: Corner of the Doge’s Palace from 1901 shows a slice rather than a full view of the building.Art Gallery of Hamilton/Supplied
Venice is a sexy place – just ask George and Amal Clooney (married there in 2014) or Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, married there last month despite protests from locals who feel celebrity weddings commodify their city.
The protests may be new, but the notion of Venice as a picturesque backdrop for glamour and romance dates back at least as far as the 18th century, when it was an obligatory stop on the Grand Tour of European sights. The city on a lagoon in the Adriatic has been enchanting tourists ever since and has been painted by artists over and over, providing souvenirs for those who visit and cultural touchstones for those who haven’t made it yet.
Some of the artists hadn’t made it either and were just working from reproductions; others actually travelled to the city. One of those was James Wilson Morrice, the expat Montrealer who made his career in Paris at the turn of the 20th century, but who also visited Venice often. Although he seems to have left his mistress, Léa Cadoret, back in Paris, he too found the city of canals deeply romantic.
Morrice portrayed the city in different lights, including Venice at the Golden Hour.Montreal Museum of Fine Arts/Supplied
He painted it in many lights, at day and at night, acutely observing both its layered architecture and its watery reflections yet rendering them with the speed and immediacy that allows the McMichael Canadian Art Collection to claim him as Canada’s first modernist artist. (He regularly returned home where he painted Quebec snow scenes that sold well back in Europe, so his connection with Canada is not superficial.)
The gallery’s current show of Morrice’s Venice paintings is the work of Sandra Paikowsky, a Montreal art historian who wrote a book on the subject in 2023 and was invited to turn that into an exhibition. She has assembled a remarkable group of loans – the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has been particularly generous alongside other public institutions and some private collectors – and she marshals them as a classic art-historical study.
The show is arranged geographically: One section features the Rialto Bridge and the palazzi along the Grand Canal; another shows various studies of the Piazza San Marco; yet another features the campi or squares near the Accademia Bridge. Paikowsky has identified the locale of every painting and shares useful insights into Morrice’s subjects and techniques.
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In a show of 22 major canvases and 40 studies, one of her key points is the way Morrice’s finished studio pieces were remarkably faithful to the oil sketches he made sitting in cafés or at street corners, carrying a modified cigar box that could hold small panels and his paints.
Comparing The Red House (1906) to the original sketch that dates two years earlier, you can see a few tweaks: The work shows two women standing in front of a rose-coloured building but in the final version Morrice enlarges a shadow across the facade to gather the composition together. However, many of the larger works are almost indistinguishable from the studies as Morrice succeeded in maintaining the immediacy of the original.
Morrice often portrayed the popolana, or working class woman, with a top-knot hairstyle and dark shawl such as Figure in Front of the Porch of St. Mark’s Church from 1894.Montreal Museum of Fine Arts/Supplied
Paikowsky notes that specifically: Morrice did not record or reproduce the city but rather captured moments. His figures are usually seen in profile, walking across the picture plane rather than standing in its midst. He built his compositions in horizontal bands and often used a human figure to provide a vertical contrast.
He was no portraitist; few of these figures have faces and his portrait of Cadoret in the MMFA collection is uninspired. One of his favourite versions of anonymous passersby in Venice was the tear-dropped shape of the popolana, or working-class woman, with a top-knot hairdo, a dark shawl and wide skirts. You can easily pick her out because tourists or upper-class women wore lighter colours and big hats, and often carried parasols.
Sometimes the popolane walk in pairs or are accompanied by a child; a few are solitary figures. Paikowsky gently notes that Morrice may not have been aware that these women would not have walked about unaccompanied in Venice at that time.
Similarly, he favoured views of the palazzos, the aristocratic residences whose rows of articulated windows are so visually satisfying, but he seldom painted the working-class districts. A view of a building on the Fondamenta Briati in the southwest of the city, far from the main tourist haunts, is one obvious exception: It shows a simple house as night falls with the lights of a wine shop glowing on the ground floor and laundry hanging out to dry above it.
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This exhibition could use more of these social insights. Its strength is the analysis of each image, but it lacks some of the wider context. There is a welcome display of vintage postcards and guidebooks to explain the way Venice became codified for the tourist market. (A city of 150,000, Venice was already drawing 5,000 visitors a day when Morrice began visiting in the 1890s.) However, there is not much discussion of the functional city or its citizens in Morrice’s time, before the working-class depopulation that the contemporary protesters are decrying.
Viewers who want to understand how the tourist site displaced the working city will need to turn to Paikowsky’s book, James Wilson Morrice: Paintings and Drawings of Venice. “Venice was regarded as a visual object, a sacred vessel that embodied the permanent and the transitory, stateliness and ruin, and, most obviously, past and present,” she writes.
Morrice, the son of a wealthy Montreal cotton merchant, was a privileged observer of that object, a flaneur with a paintbrush. While he did successfully sell his art, his bohemian and peripatetic lifestyle (travelling eventually to North Africa and the Caribbean, places where he delighted in the colour and the light) was supported by family money. His images of Venice were romantic in their own day; he painted the gondolas but not the vaporetto, the water bus that began service in 1881.
Of course, romance is the joy of this exhibition. It includes such gems as Montreal’s Venice at the Golden Hour built around the powerful vertical of a rose-coloured palazzo dotted with green shutters; various glimpses of St. Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace, a corner here, a doorway there, and the panorama of the Grand Canal (from a private collection) with a single walking woman and a table of men at a café. A similar convivial group pops up again in a smaller work that belongs to the McMichael.
The show is pure escapism for those who love Venice, or Morrice, or just lovely pictures. And the trip to Kleinburg, Ont., is cheaper than a plane ticket to Italy, let alone a billionaire’s wedding.
Morrice in Venice continues to Sept. 21 at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont.
