View of Venice by Moonlight

By 1888 there had been a steamer running on the Grand Canal for seven years. The first vaporetto arrived in 1881, and the gondoliers struck in protest. Ziem was 67 that year, and his Venices were made indoors, worked up from the studies and the annotated sketchbooks he filled while he was actually in the lagoon. He had kept a studio at Martigues near Marseille since 1860, fitted out with little models of mosques and minarets. What came out of that studio held on to the sails, the haze and the moonlight that buyers wanted, and he repeated the arrangement many times over. He was still travelling back to the real city as late as 1892. This version is painted on wood, a panel a little over 80 centimetres across.