Félix Ziem

In 1841 a young Frenchman trained as an architect arrived in Venice for the first time, and it settled the rest of his life. Félix Ziem had studied building in Dijon and drifted down to Marseille, but the light on the lagoon turned him into a painter of water and haze. For the next 50 years he came back to Venice almost every summer, working up golden harbours and hazy domes that buyers could not get enough of.

He kept moving. Through the 1850s and 1860s he pushed east to Constantinople, Algeria and Egypt, filling sketchbooks with bright coasts and carrying them home to the studio. From 1849 the official state exhibition in Paris, the Salon, showed him year after year, and the sales made him genuinely rich, which was rare for a landscape painter of his generation.

Ziem sits at the edge of the Barbizon group, the painters who left the studio to work in the forest at Fontainebleau, though his own subject was almost always the shimmer of a port. He is often named among the first living artists to see his work enter the Louvre. When he died in Paris in 1911 at 90, his canvases were already hanging in French regional museums, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and collections across the United States.