The Puffin at Palazzo Tron by Michelle Lovric

If this post had a subtitle, it would be ‘in which the Royal Mail almost sabotages my debut at the Venice Biennale of Art and I’m made to understand that my artwork is “of no intrinsic value”.’

But in the end that’s just a commonplace tale of lost time, expense and heartbreak caused by an apparently uncaring, untrusted institution that also appears averse to the concept of answering the telephone. You can guess what happened and it reflects well only on the valiant Jack, manager of my local London branch and my lovely postie Neal, who honestly tried to swim against the tide and help.

So enough black bile. I’m not going to go all Ms Lovric versus the Post Office on you here.

This is actually a really lovely story.

And a simple one. 

My forthcoming novel, The Puffin, is as usual set in Venice.

And as has also become usual with my books, early on in the novel’s life, it began to exist in a series of poems that explored its ideas and totems: empire, coercion, hats, feathers, Habsburg Yellow, infidelity, poetry, language, animal consciousness, faith and even catastrophic plumbing, which is of course intrinsic to human unhappiness and therefore a special ornament to storytelling.

The Puffin also began to exist in the form of a hand-painted watercolour leporello. 

               

TThe leporello came courtesy of the gracious Venetian artist Matilde Dolcetti, who invites people to come to her beautiful home at the Palazzo Dandolo at San Tomà where we may work at her dining table on whatever we wish, using watercolours and the deliciously textured paper that she provides. I always make a leporello for the literary work-in-progress. It's a really precious use of time, and an exercise that invariably triggers thoughts, images, ideas and words. It even helps me with pace, as something tangible has to happen in each painted panel. It is time with the novel but not at the keyboard. It’s a full and happy refreshment.

The Puffin leporello performed its usual inspirational duties and I didn’t think any more of it – until I saw that the artist Emilia Kabakov was creating a collateral event at the Venice Biennale of Art this year. It was to be called Diario veneziano, a large-scale “total installation” curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Giulia Abate. The ambition was to transform the noble floor of Palazzo Tron into a collective narrative space: “not an exhibition about Venice, but an exhibition with Venice”. The artist and curators invited participants to contribute physical objects relating to their lives in the city, along with an explanation about why the object carried important memories, resonance and meaning.

I decided to submit the leporello, not so much as the story-model of a Venetian-based novel but as a tribute to Matilde’s grace and generosity in creating the ephemeral community of her dining table in the heart of Venice.

Diario veneziano was not a competition but I was still highly honoured and delighted to have The Puffin's leporello accepted. I’d never dreamt of being more than a regular and excited Biennale attendee (though I avoid the opening week parties). And I loved the idea of this exhibition. The Biennale is the province of international pavilions, big-name artists, publicity stunts and – more than ever this year – the art business. The crowds it draws are just one more thing Venice has to suffer. So I really appreciated the concept of giving the Venetians their own, private Biennale by them, about them and for them.

And it was even nicer to discover that my dear friend, the artist Déirdre Kelly, also has one of her works in Diario veneziano. We have collaborated as fellow Companions in the Guild of St George, the charity devoted to the works and ideas of John Ruskin. But this was the first time we have been in the same exhibition - Déirdre being a proper artist and me being just a writer who loves painting watercolours. And it was of course Déirdre who had taken me along to Matilde’s watercolour sessions in the first place.  

The Puffin, by the way, is a sequel to what's undoubtedly my best-known novel The Book of Human Skin. The Puffin works as a standalone, introducing new characters and new ideas – but readers who enjoyed Human Skin’s garrulous villain will perhaps feel pleasantly uncomfortable to welcome him back as one of a chorus of narrators. This time, not all of them are human.

The book is published on October 8th. Salt Publishing have designed my favourite-ever cover in a process that was joyfully collaborative. I’ll be doing some events to launch The Puffin, including the Venice Noir festival in November and being interviewed by our poetical Dean, Mark Oakley, at Southwark Cathedral on October 20th (Save the date!)

And of course I have other publicity duties ... 

Although I had for a long time despaired of social media, I worked out that Instagram was probably the most palatable for me. A Puffin in Venice Insta page was born. I acquired a life-size replica of a puffin and began to take him on my journeys around Venice. 

I was happy because it meant that I could work with David Winston, whose photographs of Venice tell incredible stories of their own. David has kindly done various puffin shoots with me, like this one at Benevento in the Strada Nuova, where we illustrated scenes from the book using their fabulous array of damasks, feathers, shoes and a very frightening mannequin.

I treated Instagram as I would a novel – not something personal, but part of my work as a writer. I found a voice for the puffin which means he writes himself. He gives historical insights, he comments wryly, he jokes, he points out the ridiculous. He meets local wildlife. He supports local causes like NoGrandiNavi, which opposes the cruise ships that pollute Venice. He is not exactly the same as the puffin of the novel because he has different work to do.  

And, after being very scared of AI, I found a use for it. Writing captions made use of my literary brain but hashtags rotted it. I use AI to generate the hashtags. So also, they are not my fault.

Despite my poor camera skills and cheap old phone, I went out on the streets to seek original material and I have to say that the puffin has brought me some completely unexpected pleasures. 

The first is seeing things from a different angle – in miniature and in detail. Puffin pictures work best that way. I have loved the chance to refocus.

The second is the joy, for a solitary writer, of interacting with living human beings. Whether I’m taking the puffin to be blessed by the local priest along with cats and dogs at Santa Marina, going shopping with him at antique fairs or smuggling him into exhibitions, people are always intrigued by him. Some do double-takes, thinking the resin model is real. Several people have said gloomily, ‘Now we have PUFFINS in Venice too? It must be Global Warming.’ Other ask if they can touch. Everyone wants to know what I am up to.

I was spending a lot of time explaining the puffin and, as you might have noticed, I don’t have a lot of time. So I went to Veneziastampa in Santa Maria Materdomini – where the wonderful Michele is still using antique machinery. I had some puffin cards printed, and that turned out to be another lovely experience. The cards are very popular. I have to keep reprinting them.

In the last two years, I have also worked with a delightful milliner, Tina Giuntini (aka Bea Evie) who makes bespoke hats, as does Alva, the fiery heroine in my book. Tina lent me the antique millinery tools she collects, so I could feel them in my hands as I wrote the scenes in which they figure. Tina has checked the book for millinery faux pas. To illustrate a part of the plot, she even made me a Bergère bonnet with ribbon compartments for musket balls and rolled-up maps.

Tina also created a tiny Napoleon hat for the puffin and is working a turban with a miniature Barbary plume. All for Instagram, but also for joy.

Speaking of joy, now the leporello stands in a vitrine at the Palazzo Tron's Biennale event, surrounded by toys, handmade lace, wedding veils, antique fishing baskets, letters, schoolbooks and so many other things contributed by Venetians. My explanation of Matilde’s magical afternoons stands beside stories of school days, sporting events, family triumphs and tragedies. Naturally the puffin and I went along to see. It is hard to convey how happy this makes me. 

You were perhaps wondering about the melodramatic subtitle to this post … so I will explain. Yes, the Royal Mail lost the original leporello and my frantic attempts to track it down failed. With the deadline for delivering artwork by then three days way, I hastily repainted the leporello from photographs of the original and sent it to the curators by a reliable courier just in time to be included.

In the course of trying to fill out online forms, I discovered that Royal Mail apparently characterises my leporello as ‘of no intrinsic value’. You see, I was lending it, not selling it to the exhibition. The online forms do not consent to be completed so I sent an actual letter to the Royal Mail.

The leporello, I told them, ‘never was and never will be for sale. But it is a piece of original art that was judged interesting enough for the Venice Biennale of Art, so the Royal Mail’s estimation of “no intrinsic value” says more about the Royal Mail than it does about the artwork.’

Interestingly, the Royal Mail actually replied on May 12. ‘I’m happy to advise,’ wrote my correspondent, apparently without irony, ‘ … that your item was delivered on 11/05/2026.’ There was no mention of the fact that this date was nearly seven weeks after it was posted (via a 3 – 5 day tracked service), a Biblical 40 days after the deadline for exhibition submissions and two days after the Biennale actually opened. There was no explanation of the delay.

Who knows if the original leporello was ever really delivered? I have heard nothing from the curators. The Royal Mail has not to date answered my request for proof of delivery. 

Meanwhile, on a happier note, I have just discovered that my Insta puffin has fellow-travellers on the Isle of Man. The Manx Wildlife Trust (MWT) has used the same resin models to attract puffins back to the Calf of Man, a small island without human inhabitants. The marine conservation officer Lara Howe has explained that puffins are sociable and prefer to breed in colonies, so showing other puffins already in place convinces the living birds that the Calf is a good place to settle.

Perhaps I can attract a permanent colony of puffins to Venice this way? We already have beautiful egrets, cormorants, herons and even owls (none of which the tourists, lost in their phones, ever never seem to notice). 

The puffin is sometimes known as the northernmost Bird of Paradise. 

I think they would feel quite at home in what John Ruskin described as 'the Paradise of Cities'.

Michelle Lovric’s website

'Diario veneziano'
9 May — 28 June 2026
Ca' Tron, Sestiere Santa Croce 1957, Venice (two minutes from the San Stae vaporetto stop).

EFFIE GRAY'S REVENGE ON JOHN RUSKIN.

BY ESSIE FOX

John Ruskin (1819-1900)

Following on from my previous post, I'm returning this month with more gossip regarding the personal affairs of John Ruskin - the celebrated artist, writer and critic whose ardent support for the Pre-Raphaelites helped to establish their good reputation, achieving the fame they so desperately sought.

But the passion expressed for the world of art was not transferred to the marriage bed, even when Ruskin came to wed Effie Gray - the attractive and lively young woman whose charms had inspired several offers of marriage, and led to more than one broken heart.

The couple first met when Effie was a child, their parents being acquainted and often sharing each other's company. Ruskin, who was older, soon became very fond of the little girl, so much so that when he was was twenty-one and Effie only twelve years old, she inspired him to write a fairytale. The King of Golden River was published in 1851 and became a Victorian classic.

John Ruskin as a child

However, there is some evidence that much like his friend Lewis Carroll, Ruskin felt far more at ease in the innocent company of the young, perhaps reliving through imagination his own happy childhood memories.

 Ruskin's portrait of Rose la Touche

Following the annulment of his marriage to the needy and womanly Effie, it was a girl called Rose La Touche who eventually won John Ruskin's heart. They met when she was nine years old, when her family engaged him to tutor the girl - about which Ruskin was to write, "...in the eventful year of 1858, a lady wrote to me from - somewhere near Green Street, W., - saying, as people sometimes did, in those days, that she saw I was the only sound teacher in Art...that she wanted her children - two boys and a girl - taught the beginnings of Art rightly; especially the younger girl, in whom she thought I might find some power worth developing."

Ruskin and Rose became very close. When not together they often wrote, her letters addressed to St Crumpet. He proposed in 1868, by which time he was almost fifty years old and Rose was just eighteen. But her family were greatly concerned regarding Rose's happiness, so much so that they wrote to Effie (now the respectable wife of Millais) to enquire about what had really occurred surrounding the scandal of her divorce.

Effie's response was to suggest that a marriage to Ruskin should not go ahead and, whether it was this influence or other religious differences, Rose la Touche turned her suitor down.

Rose la Touche on her deathbed by Ruskin

The result was enormous unhappiness. Rose died when twenty-seven years old, by then being placed in a nursing home when her parents feared their daughter mad. The tragedy of her premature death led to Ruskin's great despair, employing spiritualist mediums to try and contact Rose's soul, and then becoming quite convinced that the Renaissance artist, Carpaccio, had included Rose's portrait in his paintings of Saint Ursula. 

Whatever the misery and pain that had been suffered by Effie Gray during her marriage to Ruskin, it would seem that he paid the heaviest price. Effie's revenge was a dish served cold - but a dish of the utmost potency.


Essie Fox new novel, Elijah's Mermaid, is a Victorian psychological drama concerning an artist's doomed affairs, and the tragic results for the women who are chosen to be his muse. 

A VICTORIAN LOVE TRIANGLE

BY ESSIE FOX

Autumn Leaves by Millais

A few days ago, I went to Tate Britain to view the latest 'blockbuster' exhibition: Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-garde.

Today, I'm still musing on my reaction to the show, which was more muted than I would have expected, considering my love for the era and art. I found many paintings to be somewhat insipid, even to the point of twee. I found that in life, just as in reproduction, the busy and florid canvasses produced by Holman Hunt are likely to fill me with stark irritation, hardly able to look at one more of his pompous, overblown scenes by the time I'd reached the exit door.

But, what is without doubt in my mind is the fact that, of this group of artists, there are some who really shine for me, and of these my favourites have to be Millais, Burne-Jones and Rossetti; every one of them standing out as great masters above the general throng. And as fascinating as the art are the stories that lie behind their scenes - stories that are, more often than not, linked with the women who they loved; who acted as muses for their art.

Effie Gray in her youth - painted by Thomas Richmond

Many of Millais' paintings are modelled on the figure of Effie Gray, the woman who became his wife but who, at the start of his career, was married to John Ruskin, the influential critic and patron without whose support the Pre-Raphaelites may never have achieved quite the same success.

Millais' portrait of Ruskin, produced while he shared a holiday in Scotland with his patron

Millais was often invited to spend time with his patron and admirer. While on a visit to Scotland, both Mr and Mrs Ruskin posed as models for his work. By day the young artist painted. By night he lay in a room in a lodge, only separated from his hosts by a thin partition wall. He could hear every movement and breath of the woman with whom he'd become obsessed - and no doubt he also realised the lack of physical intimacy occurring in the marital bed.

The Order of Release by Millais, with Effie Ruskin modelling as the wife - currently on show at Tate Britain.

Millais' passion for Ruskin's wife led to the three of them being involved in one of Victorian England's most celebrated scandals. Very soon after that holiday Effie left her husband and faced public disgrace when petitioning for a divorce. During the ensuing court case Ruskin was shown to be a man who was cold and detached from reality, who rejected his young wife's amorous requests and left her plagued by nervous distress - the fact of which was illustrated in this letter to her father:

"He alleged various reasons, hatred to children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason...that he imagined that women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person..."

Much speculation was to arise when these facts were presented in the court as to whether Ruskin's disgust had been at the sight of female public hair or a woman's menstruation. But the fire of gossip was eventually doused. Effie was granted her divorce on the grounds of non-consummation - although only after medical examinations that proved she was a virgin still - after which she and Millais were free to wed. Society re-embraced them and they lived a fulfilled domestic life, during which period Millais produced many more great paintings.

One such painting is Autumn Leaves - an apt image for this time of year when the leaves are beginning to fall from trees and the air will soon be fogged and tinged with nostalgic scents of bonfire smoke. In this scene his wife's younger sister, Sophie, is posed as the girl who is just about to throw more leaves onto the burning pyre. The picture is full of symbolism. The fires of passion about to light in this prepubescent girl. The death of youth and innocence. And what is that questioning in Sophie's eyes as they stare right out of the painting's frame? By contrast, the other girls' expressions seem to be very much 'simpler'. All are engrossed in the pile of leaves rather than who might be watching them.

Effie in middle age

Could there have been yet another love triangle affecting Effie's marital life - Effie, who by now had grown older and been worn down by regular childbirths, whose husband was increasingly drawn to paint his younger sister-in-law?

Portrait for a girl (Sophie Gray)

Through other canvasses produced, the viewer is able to view Sophie's transition from a child on the cusp of adulthood to the alluring vision of sensuality where the flushed face is all too knowing, where the red of the lips simply begs to be kissed, and the heart on the front of the model's gown is a blatant statement of growing affection between the artist and his muse.

Whatever happened, or did not, there was talk of Effie being upset and arguments breaking out in the house. The result was that Sophie was asked to leave and, at the age of twenty-four, she suffered a nervous breakdown, going on to exhibit all the signs of what we now call anorexia.

Was that condition caused by Sophie's broken heart? Did the young woman simply wish to retain the form that beguiled her brother-in-law? We shall never know the truth. This affair did not reach the law courts and its intimate details were never exposed as in the case of Ruskin v Gray.



For more on Essie Fox, please see www.essiefox.com