Most famous for his views of Venice and Istanbul, Félix Ziem was a nomadic, unique and eccentric artist. His long, prolific career began in the 1840s when he fell in love with the landscape of the Mediterranean and, later, Venice. Ziem traveled extensively throughout his life and would come to attract a wide range important patrons who were entranced by the artist’s beautiful depictions of the many sights he saw while on his travels. Uninterested in the Realist movement that was the driving force in landscape art in the last decades of the 19th century, Ziem instead maintained his own unique style throughout his life. A brilliant colorist, Ziem painted with a vibrant palette and was particularly interested in understanding the effects of sunlight on landscape, which he rendered beautifully in his paintings.

The artist’s best-known work was produced on his many trips to Venice, where Ziem travelled numerous times between 1842 and 1897, sometimes painting from a floating studio on a gondola. Les jardins français, as they were known in the 19^th century because they were constructed by Napoleon, are now better known as the Giardini della Biennale, the setting for the Venice Biennale.

The present painting has a distinguished provenance, having belonged to the early French ophthalmologist and art collector, Dr. Charles Abadie. Abadie was a highly regarded doctor who was involved in treating Edgar Degas and developed a pioneering treatment for glaucoma. It was acquired at his auction in 1913 by Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, an Ottoman-born British-Armenian businessman and philanthropist who played a major role in making the petroleum reserves of the Middle East available to Western development and amassed an enormous art collection during his lifetime. It then passed through the hands of M. Knoedler and Co. to Clarence Whybrow, an English-born interior designer who had residences in a number of cities across the US. One of these was Pittsburgh, where the next owner would reside, and it is therefore likely that it was Whybrow who sold the work to George Washington Crawford. A wealthy executive in the oil and gas industry, Crawford was the chairman of the Columbia Gas & Electric Co., among the largest utility companies in the United States during his lifetime. With his wife Annie Laurie Crawford Aitken, who inherited the present painting upon his death, he was father to Martha Sharpe Crawford, later better-known as the heiress and socialite Sunny von Bülow.

We are grateful to The Association Félix Ziem, represented by David Pluskwa, Gérard Fabre and Mathias Ary Jan, for confirming the authenticity of this work, which will be included in their forthcoming catalogue raisonné.