An Interior in Venice

By the 1890s the grandest American gathering place in Venice was a rented floor of the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal, where Daniel and Ariana Curtis kept a salon that drew Henry James, Whistler and Monet. In 1898 Sargent, a family friend, painted the Curtises in that faded gilt drawing room, the older couple in the foreground, their son and his wife taking tea behind. He offered it to Ariana as thanks for years of hospitality. She turned it down. She thought it made her look too old and disliked her own casual pose, and she sent it back. Sargent gave the rejected canvas instead to the Royal Academy in London as his diploma work, where Henry James, a constant guest at the palazzo, said he adored it above almost any Sargent he knew.