Venetian Life

This picture was one of the most popular shown at the Royal Academy in the 1880s. It was celebrated by critics for its 'Gorgeousness of colour, seldom seen in the work of English painters, masterly drawing and masterly painting’. According to L.V. Fildes’ biography of his father: 'By general consent Fildes, still a junior in the Academy, was again ranked with Leighton and Millais, and now with Orchardson, as the painters of the 'pictures of the year’’. Indeed, although Fildes’ reputation has now somewhat been eclipsed by Leighton and Millais, he was in his day their equal: he had a studio house adjacent to theirs in Melbury Road, Holland Park; he was knighted by Edward VII; and he painted the coronation portraits of both Edward VII and George V.

The picture reinforced a departure, marked by A Village Wedding, shown the previous year at the RA, from Dickensian subjects of brutal realism such as Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (Royal Holloway College, London). As The Times observed 'he has gone to the extreme of gaiety and brilliance of colour. …The faces are all as attractive as Mr Fildes could make them, and the dresses as strongly coloured and as sharply contrasted as could be. There has been no hesitation about using the very brightest reds on the most dazzling yellow, blues and greens: and with all this the painter has secured a composition that is singularly harmonious as well as vivid.'

The scene is set in the doorway of a crumbling Venetian palazzo, now a tenement building, in which a group of women have assembled in the evening to sew and chat and bathe their children. The central motif is the making of lace, which is a tour de force of technique, a truly bravura piece of painting. As The Art Journal noted 'scantiness of money in Venice does not carry with it that depression and misery that overwhelm the English poor. There is a natural peace and beauty and a brightness and gaiety with these Venetians that appear to envelop them, and is so characteristic to those who perceive it…’.

The picture was admired by Sir John Aird, a civil engineer whose first coup was to disassemble and reassemble the Crystal Palace in a new location. He served as an MP and was created a baronet in 1901. Known to artists as 'St John Aird of the large heart’, he was a generous patron, and amassed a significant picture collection, mainly of large, powerful and complex compositions shown at the Royal Academy. His collection numbered works by Leighton, Poynter, Dicksee and Waterhouse, but he acquired his most celebrated masterpiece in 1891: Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus. In 1902, to celebrate the completion of the Aswan Dam, across the River Nile, Aird commissioned from Alma-Tadema The Finding of Moses. Both of these pictures now hold the records for the top two works from the period sold at auction.