Venetian Twilight

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson 1889–1946

T00862 Venetian Twilight circa 1918–19

Inscr.‘C. R. W. Nevinson’ b.r.
Canvas, 16 x 20 (40.5 x 51).
Purchased at Christie’s from funds bequeathed by Miss Dahlia Gordon 1966.
Coll. Bt. from the artist by J. W. Hayes-Longcroft 1919; bt. Mrs. Yvonne Chalmers Wright, c. 1955; sold Christie’s, 13 May 1966 (113) as ‘A Gondola on the Grand Canal, Venice’.
Exh. Leicester Galleries, October–November 1919 (6).

A photograph of this work was pasted by Nevinson into an album now dismembered and at the Tate Gallery. It bears the number 103 and appears among the pictures which can be identified in the show which he called ‘Peace’. Some are in earlier styles and may have been painted concurrently with his earlier war pictures, but this one can be related to a group which seems to have been painted together and later, even though he deliberately varied his style, according to subject matter, between a kind of Cubism and Impressionism. The date for all of them, including ‘Venetian Twilight’, must have been around 1918–19, in spite of the fact that Nevinson’s autobiography does not record a visit to Venice after one he paid as a student, probably in 1909.

Published in The Tate Gallery Report 1966–1967, London 1967.