AFA Winter 2019

In 1895, Palmer produced two views of San Marco in Venice, a compact, vertical painting that displays the full height of the campanile, and the Albany Institute’s horizontal composition with a wider, more open view that imparts a grander sense of space. Here, Palmer included more of the Procuratie Nuove on the far right and he severely cropped the campanile, leaving it jutting off the top edge of the painting. His positioning of the campanile in this horizontal format divides the painting roughly into thirds, with two-thirds being given to San Marco on the left. For both paintings Palmer used the same color palette. When the vertical San Marco was shown in the National Academy exhibition in 1895, a reviewer in The New York Times remarked on its “brilliant bit of color.” Palmer’s use of blues and violets set against gold, green, and rose create a jewel-like impression. These same colors became something of a trademark for Palmer. He used them in other Venetian scenes and also in his popular winter landscapes, yet for each subject the colors create very different atmospheric effects. When Palmer exhibited his first major painting of Venice in Albany in 1882, it created a sensation. “It is a dreamy composition, naturally, and half closing one’s eyes it seems like a fairy delusion that might vanish with a breath,” wrote one reviewer for the Albany Express . Venetian Twilight , painted several years later, is every bit as dreamlike. “There is brilliant coloring in ‘A Venetian Twilight,’ in which the gold colored lights are pleasingly set off by the turquoise blue sky and water,” noted one reviewer when the painting went on view at the Avery Gallery in New York in December 1896. The work remained with Palmer and eventually passed to his daughter Beatrice, who donated it to the Albany Institute in 1942 along with several other paintings, sketches, photographs, and manuscript materials from her father. Winter 92 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932), Venetian Twilight, 1896. Watercolor, gouache, and crayon on composition board, 20 x 30 inches. Albany Institute of History & Art; Gift of Beatrice Palmer (1942.34.30). Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932), San Marco, 1895. Oil on composition board, 19 x 29 inches. Albany Institute of History & Art; Gift of Beatrice Palmer (1942.34.33).