Martín Rico y Ortega (Spanish, 1833-1908) Ca' Rezzonico, Venezia Oil on canvas 28-3/4 x 18-1/4 inches (73.0 x 46.4 cm) Signed lower right: Rico PROVENANCE: Charlotte and Frank Lankford, Birmingham; Alabama; By descent to the present owner. A stunning Venetian palazzo with pride of place on the Grand Canal, the Ca' Rezzonico was begun in the seventeenth-century by Baldassare Longhena (architect of Santa Maria della Salute) and completed by Giorgio Massari in 1760. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the magnificent structure had fallen on hard times, having been sold and resold after the last member of the Rezzonicos (family of Pope Clement XIII) died in 1810. During Austria's control of Venice from 1815, the occupying soldiery had used the palazzo as a barracks, baking their bread on the piano nobile. After the soldiers vacated it, Ca' Rezzonico stood empty until the 1850s, when the second floor became an art gallery for dealer Jacobo Querci della Rovere. From the 1870s artists such as Giovanni Boldini, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent made the large, airy rooms their studios. By the time Pen Browning, son of the poets Elizabeth and Robert Browning, bought it in 1887 it was in dire need of rehabilitation; this was accomplished in a lavish manner with the wealth of Pen's American wife Fannie Coddington. When Henry James saw the Brownings' transformation, he wrote his sister, "What Pen Browning has done here transcends description for the beauty, and, as Ruskin would say, ‘wisdom and rightness' of it. It is altogether royal and imperial." HID03101062020 © 2020 Heritage Auctions | All Rights Reserved