Hair in all the wrong places – Michelle Lovric

 

My forthcoming novel, The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, is about hair.

Long, vigorous yet soft, feminine hair. Hair that flows in rich torrents from seven pretty heads. Hair that can be put to work, making money for men who peddle long-tressed dolls and quack medical products for the scalp.

For The Harristown Sisters is set in the 1860s, the age of arch pseudo-medicine, when human perfectability was for sale in a bottle whose contents could be advertised without any regulation as to truth or safety.  A new power-base in the feminine purse, in the mid nineteenth century, shared a cultural vortex with the Pre-Raphaelite painters and the poets who both celebrated and problematized the hair of women as an expression of passionate and unruly desires.

The English Poetry Database, where I first began my researches, teemed with 19^th century works featuring ‘hair’, ‘curl’ and ‘tresses’. Browning, Rossetti and their lesser ilk wrote longingly of lying under silky tents of feminine hair, or of being strangled by the fatal tresses of supernatural sirens like Lilith, Adam’s first, wicked wife, who alleged dined on human babies. Above is Monna Vanna, by Dante Gabriele Rossetti and below his Lady Lilith, now at the Delaware Museum (both paintings courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

 

But it would be transcending bliss to die in a coil of female hair, according to the poets, tapping neatly into the post-Albertine Victorians’ fascination with all things deathly. Miniature hair reliquaries were worn by fashionable women: glass fronted jewels containing the hair of the lamented deceased.

And the matrons of England and America were encouraged to spend on their hair, on the principle that a husband would remain captivated by his wife’s long-flowing feminine charms while her sensible housekeeping extracted only dry compliments.

It was the age of Edward’s Harlene, Koko for the Hair and most of all the preparations of America’s Seven Sutherland Sisters, who had thirty seven feet of hair between them.  They are pictured in one their classic poses below - they performed in circuses and shows where they sold their Scalp Food and Hair Restorer, being living advertisements for the efficacy of these potions. These sisters provided the inspiration for my novel, though I chose to set it in Ireland and Venice, where the Pre-Raphaelites, the earlier artists who inspired them, and the dawn of photography had more cultural resonance in my study of hair.

In the course of my research I also explored the problem of hair where hair should not be. In mid-Victorian times, this was personified by Julia Pastrana, the diminutive Mexican ‘Baboon Lady’ who danced the Highland Fling and sang on the stage to the horror and delight of American and British audiences.

Weeds are sometimes described as plants simply growing in the wrong place. Hair that grows abundantly in the prescribed zones is a bio-marker of desirable breeding stock. A hand running through a curl attached the beloved’s head finds only pleasure and sentiment. But when hair appears in the wrong place – such as in our soup – we feel revulsion and a sense of dirtiness.

Julia Pastrana – a gentle soul who spoke three languages and loved sewing – suffered from hypertrichosis. She was furred all over her body, had a beard and a simian visage caused by another rare condition, Gingival hyperplasia.

 

Billed as ‘the ugliest woman in the world,’ Julia was arguably the most celebrated ‘freak’ of the age. Even after her death, her embalmed body, in a dancing pose, would be exhibited all over Europe by unscrupulous sideshow managers, first and foremost her own husband, Theodore Lent.

The treatment of Julia Pastrana taps into two key moral debates of our own time: where does celebrity culture cross over into criminal intrusion and venality at the expense of the prey? And why is the ‘disgusting’ such a viable commodity? Embarrassing bodies, sexual failure, eating disorders: there’s a pornography of body dysfunction paraded on the television screens every night of the week.

A play and a film have been written about Julia Pastrana, and a third is in production.  The Ass Ponys recorded a song about her mind, life and marriage, with a refrain ‘He loves me for my own sake’, highly ironic under the circumstances.

It is less than two years since Julia Pastrana’s body finally received a picturesque burial in her native Mexico.

As an exercise in empathy, during the writing of The Harristown Sisters, I decided to write a personal essay as Julia Pastrana. People who are monstered rarely have voices. It is the way of dehumanization to render the victim silent. I wanted to give Julia the privilege of looking out of her anathematized body, instead of merely being looked at. I also wondered what she would have thought about her posthumous repatriation to Mexico, and finally concluded that it would find small favour with her.

This part of my research was not published, but it informed a great deal of what I wrote about in The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters.

I wonder if others among you find that some of your most interesting work stays off the published page? Examples, please!

This post really ends with that question, but below, as an optional extra, is my personal essay as Julia Pastrana.

Michelle Lovric's website

Unless otherwise attributed, the pictures are courtesy of Wellcome Images, which has recently made its wonderful historical collection available for general use.

The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters is published on June 5th by Bloomsbury

Julia Pastrana

Eighteen thirty-four, I’m born in Mexico, a baboon of a baby, hooded whiteless eyes filled up with lucent brown. My jaw thrusts out like an orange, or a bustle, split by two great slugs of lips snug over double rows of teeth. My forehead slopes steeply back; there’s fur on my feet, and shags and tufts and gouts of hair everywhere, everywhere that hair shouldn’t be.

By three my beard was tied with string. My tribe in Sinaloa de Leyva mumbled things about my mother but they let me live. Ma slapped children when they screamed at the sight of me, but I guessed from her averted eyes and sparing hands that she wished me unborn.  I could not crawl back inside her so I grew away from her.

I peaked at four and a half feet, with breasts, beckoning thighs, a supple dancing style, a melodious voice, a tongue for languages, a cool hand for pastry, and a desire to please the men with hair where hair should be.

A pink ribbon round my beard now, tight-laced in a Spanish dress, I was hired as a servant girl to the governor of Sinaloa. My mother’s eyes were opaque as the cart took me away. She did not wave

The governor brought me out after dark to serve port to male guests. One of them, a Mr Rates, watched me with long eyes through the candle flames. Late in the night, he threw a purse across the table.

 Mr Rates was my first handler. He handled me onto the stage: Gothic Hall, New York, was deemed the best place for a gothic beast like me. I was twenty then; sang and danced with fluent grace to jungle roars from the stalls, and roses flung, quite hard.  Behind my whiteless eyes, I learned English and dreamt of soft hands parting my fur with caresses and a man who’d let me dance for him, unpaid.

My billing was ‘The Marvelous Hybrid or Bear Woman’, she of the gorilla’s jaw, ape’s eyes, and hair where hair should not be. The New York papers showed their love: ‘terrifically hideous’, they said I was.

The doctors lifted, inserted, prodded till I cried. Mott from the Medical Society pronounced me ‘the most extraordinary being of the present day’, being the result of my Mexican mother mating with an orang-utan. Proof of her depravity: she’d sold me to the circus. If I mentioned otherwise, Mr Rates told me quietly, he’d skin me for my pelt and stuff me.

‘Then,’ he reflected, ‘you’d be pure profit. No cost in food and board. Remember this.’

The demi-monkey waltzed with soldiers at a military gala, knowing the fellows had been dared, feeling their reluctance through the tense fingers on my back, where my gown crushed the fur almost but not quite flat.

In Boston I was styled ‘the Hybrid Indian: The Misnomered Bear Woman’ – by the Horticultural and the Boston History Society. Neither could decide whether ‘animal’ or ‘vegetable’ best described the thing I was.

Mr Rates sold me to J.W. Beach of Cleveland. From him, I came into the possession of one Theodore Lent, my small-eyed darling, my bearded destiny, who, judging me worth the passage, carried me off to London, where they went mad for me and the hair that grew where hair should not be, while I fell deep in love with Lent, and he not at all with me.

How it clamped my heart when my love billed me ‘The Nondescript’. He claimed it meant my marvels surpassed description. It did not. ‘The grotesque’s dancing is like a fairy’s,’ the London papers wrote. ‘The monster sings romances and lilts Highland Flings to perfection.

Charles Darwin wrote of me kindly, but published me in The Variation of Animal and Plants under Domestication.

By now I spoke a lady’s English. My knitting was a credit to me, though my Theodore refused to touch the gaiters I made him. He’d swallow my little suppers with an averted face.

He coached me to tell of twenty marriage proposals turned down: to say that no admirer had yet proved rich enough to catch my glistening eye.

‘There will be someone,’ he promised, ‘There’s always someone with an itch for a thing like you.’

He toured me in Berlin and Leipzig to raise my price. I acted in a play, Der curierte Meyer. A German boy falls in love with a veiled woman. But when he goes offstage, I lift the gauze, convulsing the audience with hilarity at the horror of my baboon face. When my lover sees me unveiled, his cure is instant. I rehearsed with Theodore, till I could take it without flinching.

No rich suitors came to marry me, but other handlers loomed in, offering terms and smiles. Theodore proposed. On our wedding night, he closed his face, the shutters, the curtains and put out the light. He divided me rough and sudden from my girlhood. In the morning, he was gone, and stayed gone for days. I did not allow the stained sheets changed and lay sleepless on my hardened blood, remembering. My heart beat like jungle rain when he appeared again; I cried from joy if his lips curved upwards. His eyes never smiled when they looked on me.

In Vienna he let more doctors pay to do what he had done in the darkest part of me, with sharp cold tools instead of his hard heat and shouted obscenities. He locked me in our rooms by day. In Poland and Moscow, he grew crueller and harder though I stood on tiptoe in everything to please him. He still came to me some nights, roaring on gin. He clapped his hand over my great lips, grasped the bedstead rungs and laboured on me. Afterwards he’d fling himself from me, groaning, to vomit in his chamber pot and strode swearing from the room.

Yet he got a child on me.

No baby ever had such a delightful layette, every item stitched by me. The nursery I had painted all the colours of hope. Of course I wondered what was growing inside me, the little stranger was already beloved. Theo kept away. If I saw his face, it was in profile only.

He did not burn the anonymous letters but left them for me to see. You have mated with a beast. You have stained mankind with bestiality.

The birth tore my narrow hips apart. Worse than pain was the sight of my son who took after me with whiteless eyes, bustle-jaw and hair where hair should not be. I slapped myself so as not to scream at the sight of him. His hours of life were thirty five.

‘Put it in a bucket and throw it in the river,’ Theodore told the maid.

Puerperal sepsis seized me like a serpent, poisoned me, shook me, till I saw Sinaloan ghosts again, the New York stage, Theodore’s face. My widower did not visit my deathbed, sent the photographer instead. He was in deep negotiations to sell our two corpses to Professor Sukolov at the Anatomical Institute in Moscow, and had gone to buy a monkey the height of a two-year-old child. The public, he told the maid, loving horror as they did, would not accommodate a baby, even semi-human, stuffed. ‘Better this,’ he said, wringing the monkey’s neck and kissing the maid’s.

At the sound of his lips on her skin, my hairless soul rose from my corpse. No funeral. Instead, I watched Sukolov dissect the monkey and me side by side on stained slabs. I saw the scalpel separate my skin, cried out soundlessly when he chose a finer blade for the poor small creature. I began to feel for my monkey child a fierce new love.

 

For six months, the professor hovered over us, extracting, scouring, packing, stitching us to such perfection that we retained our colour and our form. My sawdust-stiffened limbs were mounted in my old dancing pose, hand on hip. A crucifix hid the seam that held my breasts together. Sewn into a short Spanish dress, I was set up in a glass case, my false simian son in a sailor suit on a pedestal in a separate box where I might stare at him as the paying customers did. 

News came to Theodore of the great crowds we drew and the great sums made for Sukolov. Our marriage certificate, presented to the American consul, robbed the Russian professor of his hard-won profits. That gaunt February of sixty-two, Theodore shipped us back to England; charged a shilling a look at the ‘Embalmed Nondescript’ and her progeny. Then he hired us out to a travelling museum of curiosities, I, the monster with hair where hair should not be, still topped the bills and filled the tents.

By now Theodore had found a girl near as hairy as myself. He set her up as “Zenora Pastrana”, my sister. He married her as well. The four of us, two living and two dead, toured till Theodore tired – his calculating mind slowed for the first but not the last time to a sick ticking. He rented his first wife and supposed son to a Vienna museum. With my corpse retired, he claimed that Zenora was me. The two repaired to St Petersburg, bought a waxworks. It was there my Theodore, Zenora’s Theodore, the stock exchange’s Theodore went mad. In the asylum, my spirit watched him long days writhing on his bed. It danced my Highland Fling for him, combed the hair where it should be, and touched him till he shrieked. He died insensible or perhaps fully sensible of me for the first time.

In eighty-eight, Zenora left Russia, reclaimed our bodies, toured them. Wooed by a young man, she sold us to an anthropological exhibit in Munich. J.B. Gassner put our bodies on the German fair circuit. At a circus convention in Vienna, he auctioned the monstrous Madonna and her brute baby. For a quarter of a century we passed from hand to calloused hand for cash.

The new century felt the old disgust for a pair of creatures with hair where hair should not be. In ‘twenty-one, Haakon Lund bought us for his Norwegian chamber of horrors. That was the year my name was divided from my body. ‘Julia Pastrana’ was not listed on the bill of sale. The new generation of shilling-payers did not think me real, but a diabolical confection of horsehair and leather, a relic of more barbarous times before Modernity, its brute lines, featureless towers, slot windows, slack chairs and inhumanly pale renders. I thought Modernity a diabolic confection of vanity and laziness. Modernity and I agreed to disagree.

When the Nazis thundered into Norway they ordered us destroyed. But Lund made them believe an Ape woman tour would line the Third Reich’s coffers, while showing to a hairy nicety miscegenation’s awful perils. On the strength of the world’s worst ever idea, my monkey son and me outlasted the war and the pale blue eyes that despised us up and down the Rhine.

 ‘Fifty-three and the good times were over for monsters. Lund stored his chamber of horrors, including us, in a warehouse outside Oslo. Rumours spread of a ghastly ape haunting the midnight dust. Teenage horror-seekers broke in, surrounded us, opened their mouths in ‘O’s and screamed till I thought our glass would shatter. Lund’s son Hans saw new money in the teenage stories in the press. He set us back to earn.

But now at last, someone remembered the old ape lady Julia Pastrana. In ‘sixty-nine, Judge Hofheinz, collector of curiosities, hired detectives to hunt down the Female Nondescript. Hans set up a bidding war for our corpses, only to withdraw from the sale to profit from the press’s frantic delight. He put us on the circus routes of Sweden and Norway, then shipped us to America. Here a New Age public finally found its conscience and cried out against the poor corpses paraded. So Hans rented us to Swedes. Again I travelled until people, month by month, grew ashamed of seeing me. I settled into years of peaceful warehouse dust, tender as fingers on my cheek.

Then the vandals came. They tore off my son’s arm, punched his little jaw, threw him in a gutter where the mice ate him. By the time he was found, he was in small scraps. I was left alone in my glass case looking at his empty pedestal, year on year.

‘Seventy-nine, I was stolen in the night. Once more, I was separated from my name. Children found my arm protruding from a ditch. The police pulled an entire woman, with hair where it should not be, from the mud and leaves. A crime against a woman dead a hundred years could not be chased.  And who would charge dead Theodore with selling his wife, living and dead?

They delivered me to the Norwegian Institute of Forensic Medicine. I lived in its basement, a friend to mould and unsolved case files.

Nineteen-ninety, I felt the old cold draft of a journalist swooping down on me. I sold more newspapers when my ugly tale was knitted to my old body again.

Norwegian priests pressed for a Christian burial.  A compromise – a sarcophagus in Oslo’s Museum of Medical History, a small DNA extraction first.

Twenty-twelve they sent me back Mexico, a burial my home country. A Roman Catholic mass was said over me. My coffin was borne to the cemetery in Sinaloa Province where I had begun. Instead of dirges the band played jaunty music, as if it were a fine thing to lay the dancing baboon-lady in earth at last. 

But I shall hardly rest in peace.

For why was I repatriated to a backwater I left gratefully at twenty? Was I not celebrated worldwide, a star of the stage, the newspapers’ darling? Should I not have had a hollow in the actors’ graveyard in Covent Garden? Or lie with the other famous clever ladies in Saint Pancras field? 

Or better still, I should have been allowed to sleep beside my Theodore, to lie and lie beside him for immemorial nights; to watch him gyre in his grave as the muscles died and shrank and danced his bones on leathery strings. Everything would drip from us, except my deathless hair, wrapped around his every place, a black wreath, a furring, a stirring of living hair everywhere on Theodore, everywhere my hair should justly be.

 

 

 

 

Venice on the eve of World War One, part two - Michelle Lovric

 

Having left you cruelly dangling last month – wondering both which History Girl and which lovers were in play – I am now resuming my journey down the Grand Canal, inspired by research that I undertook for Michael Portillo’s Great Continental Railway Journeys television programme.

Ever cruel, I’m still not going to tell you which History Girl or which lover. Instead, I’ll I take you straight to Casanova-ville, the San Samuele stretch of the Grand Canal. Visible from the water at the left are the church of San Samuele and Ca’ Malipiero, both the settings for formative scenes in the  life of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, including his birth in 1725 in a narrow alley behind the Malipiero palace. (In those days it was called the Calle delle Commedia).




plaque marking the birthplace of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova

Poor misunderstood Casanova, misrepresented as a Don Juan with no respect for the humanity or tenderness of women! On the contrary, Casanova adored women, body and soul. He believed a woman derived more pleasure from sex than a man, ‘because the feast is celebrated in her own house’, and declared that four-fifths of his own joy in sex was in the visible pleasure he gave. He even hoped that he might come back in another life as a woman. He loved the smell of a woman’s sweat, and he rejoiced in preparing sumptuous meals for his lovers. He wrote candidly of the sensual joy of exchanging oysters from mouth to mouth.

picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

A British visitor to Venice in 1913 might well have been aware of many such delicious details. Casanova’s memoirs, penned a century before, had been translated into English for the first time in 1894 and then again in 1902. Although somewhat censored at that stage, the twelve volume memoirs are not at all what might be expected. They constitute kind of Hello magazine for the 18th century, and are delightfully easy to read. In fact less than a third of the writing is devoted to his love life. Casanova was a scientist, an alchemist, a happy medical charlatan, a novelist and an autobiographer. He knew everyone and noticed everything from shoe buckles to salt cellars.

The picture at right was made by Casanova's brother, Francesco. It shows Casanova in his twenties.

I recorded some of the boy Casanova's San Samuele shenanigans in my earlier History Girls blog, There goes the neighbourhood.

Let us avert our eyes hastily from this scandalous behaviour and look right to Ca’ Rezzonico, an imposing structure started by Baldassare Longhena 1667 and finished by Massari in the 18th century.

Ca' Rezzonico, photo by Wolfgang Moroder, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Robert Browning

In the late 1880s, Ca’ Rezzonico became the home of Pen Browning, adored and over-coddled son of Robert and Elizabeth. Pen was by this time an undistinguished artist who had married an American heiress, Fanny Coddington. She eventually divorced him, after which the palace would be sold again.

Robert Browning had his own apartment in Ca’ Rezzonico. There he kept a parrot called Jacko who liked cake. Browning loved to feed pomegranates to the elephant at the Giardini Pubblici, often accompanied by his sister Sarianna. The pair used to go to walk or ride on the Lido in the afternoons. Pen was also an animal lover, who kept dogs and parrots and large snakes. (I’d have divorced him, too.)

Browning senior had first come to the city with his wife Elizabeth in 1851. Here is a picture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the young Pen, who also loved the city.

“I have been," she wrote, "between heaven and earth since our arrival at Venice. The heaven of it is ineffable. Never had I touched the skirts of so celestial a place.”

So it was perhaps fitting that her widower died in the city on December 12, 1889, after a cold swiftly turned nasty.

Robert Browning's funeral service held in Ca’ Rezzonico’s imposing portego with expatriate Venetian royalty in attendance: the Layards, Mrs Bronson, the Curtises. The poet had not be averse to giving readings and recitals of his works in their palazzi. And he had assisted in their campaign to set up an English church in Venice.

At this time, the American portrait painter John Singer Sargent also had a studio in the palazzo.

Later Cole Porter would rent Ca’ Rezzonico for 4000 dollars a month, engaging 50 gondoliers to act as footmen.

A few yards away from Ca' Rezzonico is a palace that always enchants visitors to Venice, seeming a perfect rosy little jewel of the Gothic. It is now a very pleasant hotel.

Palazzetto Stern, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

 

But Palazzetto Stern was quite new in 1913. Lady Enid Layard’s diary entry of 30 April 1912 records: ‘I went to the housewarming given by Mme Stern at the Palace she has just had built at S. Barnaba on the Grand Canal. It is in the Venetian gothic style & the exterior is not bad—but the interior is weird & resembles more a mosque than a dwelling house. In appears that she put the whole thing into the hands of a 2nd rate artist here Marnelta by name, a man who has evidently no idea of the wants of the life of a lady & he has therefore made domes & mosaics & put up pictures & statuettes & sheets of alabaster behind wh are electric lamps. The whole thing is one huge mistake & must be very uncomfortable to live in. Mme Stern who is an elderly lady with very good manners received her guests with great amiability & gave an excellent tea.’



Renaissance and Gothic side by side.
The red shoes are gratuitous.

A little further along on the same side we see the semi-detached Ca’ Contarini degli Scrigni and the Ca’ Contarini Corfu. The family who lived here was so rich that it was thought that the palazzo was full of treasure chests (scrigni).

This was where a good Englishman would go to pray up until the late 19th century. In 1842, the Diocese of Gibraltar was established to provide visiting clergy for English-speaking communities in the Mediterranean. At the time of the unification of Italy, Rev. John Davies Mereweather, Cavaliere della Corona d’Italia, settled in Venice. He officiated at Anglican services in his apartment in Palazzo Contarini degli Scrigni for 33 years until 1887.

As explained in the previous blog, many of our Edwardians would be clutching their Ruskins, and would look upon these sibling palaces with well-informed eyes. Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice championed the earlier palace’s Gothic style over that of its Renaissance neighbour. Long story criminally short, he favoured the curlicued trefoiled Gothic because it mimicked the wild perfection of God's natural creation, exemplified in the acanthus leaf, whereas Renaissance architecture showed only the hard and pitiless perfection of human geometry. Also, the Gothic style gave dignity to its artisans, who might fashion individual beauties. To Ruskin, the builders of the Renaissance were anonymous toilers with no more creative contribution allowed than to the men who built the pyramids.

 

Turning to our left, we see the unusual liagi or towers of the Ca’ Falier Canossa. This was originally a Gothic structure, and the characteristic windows are visible at the inner layer of the facade. The two towers were added in the late 18th century, lending the palazzo an oriental feel, surprisingly similar to buildings as far away as Muscat. 

a building with liagi in Muscat Old Town. Picture by Hin-Yan Wong

As the stupendously young American consul to Venice, William Dean Howells was driven out of this, his honeymoon palace by a venal maid, Giovanna. He later wrote about her depredations in his bestselling book Venetian Life which also contains a memorable account of a slanging match between two gondoliers and stories of Venetian cats, dogs, puppets. It was everyone’s favourite book about Venice for decades, and rightfully so. It is still one of mine.

We are now in sight of the Accademia Bridge. The current curved wooden structure is from the 1933. Our Edwardian travellers would have seen a much less romantic, flat iron bridge constructed by the Scottish engineer Alfred Neville in 1854. He built it at his own expense, charging tolls. For a brief period there were two bridges, while the new one was under construction.

 

Today lovers weigh the structure down with padlocks that the authorities are kept busy snipping off. Perhaps the first lock was piquant or faintly amusing, but the practice has now become a hazardous visual cliché. And smokers perpetually set fire to the wooden bridge by dropping their smouldering cigarette butts. The city periodically launches competitions to design a new bridge, and has even offered to sell its name and extensive advertising rights to a sponsor for the project. Watch this space, but do not invest much hope in it.

At the foot of the bridge, travellers in 1913 might have found rest at the Albergo Universo, inside the Palazzo Brandolin Rota. Indeed, Robert Browning used to stay here with his sister in 1880 -1, before the grandeur of Ca’ Rezzonico was available to him.

Ca' Barbaro, second on the left, at night

Whistler by Ralph Curtis

Ca’ Barbaro at left after the Accademia Bridge, was the home of the most prominent Americans to settle in Venice in the late nineteenth century: Daniele and Ariana Curtis, who rented it from 1881, bought it in 1885. Their son Ralph was a painter. Their cat was called Caterina Cornaro, after the queen of Cyprus, who brought the island to Venice.

Ca’ Barbaro was a great gathering place for literary and high society, though the Curtises were stern judges. Violet Piaget (also known as Vernon Lee) was another interesting character who was part of the community. She fell out with the Curtis family over her story about the community in Venice.

The Barbaro circle included Bernard Berenson, Isabella Stewart Gardner,

Edith Wharton and Charles Eliot Norton and the painter Whistler. Here is Anders Zorn's 1894 painting of Isabella emerging through the drapery on one of those wondrous evenings of the gilded expat society in Venice. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). Isabella would buy parts of Venetian palaces to set up her own Gothic-style museum in Boston.

Henry James in 1913
by John Singer Sargent
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Henry James stayed here, principally in 1887, and wrote many letters from his Venetian ‘nest’. He finished my personal favourite of his novels, The Aspern Papers, while a guest of the Curtises.

The Wings of a Dove (1902) was partly set there, though not written there, as is frequently supposed. Palazzo Leporelli in the novel is Palazzo Barbaro, and parts of the 1997 film adaptation were made here.

John Singer Sargent, a relative of the Curtises, painted in Venice every autumn from 1902 to 13. He created an atmospheric portrait of the palace and his hosts in in 1898.

photo of Arianna and Daniele Curtis

in the drawing room of Ca' Barbaro,

courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Later Harry Belafonte would perform at the Palazzo Barbaro, and more recently the Venetian scenes from the 1981 television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited were filmed here too.

Across the other side of the canal we see the pretty Ca’ Contarini Polignac.

At the beginning of the 20th century, it hosted the salon of  Princess Winnaretta de Polignac, a patron of the musical avant-garde in Europe. One can imagine the guests draped over the wonderful loggia and stairs on the left. Igor Stravinsky was among the guests here.

The Palazzo Balbi Valier Molin delle Trezze was the original home of Horatio Brown, an institution for educated British visitor. As mentioned in the previous blog, Horatio took over from Rawdon Brown as general fixer for British travellers Venice. He also took over from his namesake the historical research on the Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts relating to English Affairs existing in the Archives of Venice and Northern Italy. Horatio Brown was an author in his own right of various interesting books about the city. My favourite is Life on the Lagoons, 1884, which explores the customs, folk tales, superstitions and mating practices of the Venetians.

Horatio Brown moved to Ca’ Torresella on the Zattere, where he lived till 1926 when he when died, apart from a temporary evacuation during WW1. Every Monday evening (so as not to clash with Lady Layard) he gave a salon there and British visitors armed with letters of introduction could meet all the great and good.

Perhaps it was because of Horatio Brown that Walter Sickert claimed that the Zattere smelled ‘of the British and the Church of England and of Ruskin.’

One of Horatio Brown’s great friends was the writer John Addington Symonds.

Both had close relationships with Venetian gondoliers. Horatio Brown’s was Antonio Salin; Symonds loved Angelo Fusato – described in his explicitly homoerotic memoirs that were not published till 1984. Horatio Brown, acting as his executor, had suppressed much unpublished material after Symonds' death.

At right we see the open square of San Vio and the English church of Saint George. Its stern walls give the clue that the building was originally secular.

More and more Anglo Saxons were coming to Venice … there was a steamer service from India and from USA, and the huge English tourist boom. By the early 20th century, there were around 200 people wanting an Anglican service in the city every Sunday. So, as previously mentioned, Horatio Brown, Robert Browning, Henry Layard and others collected funds to buy a mosaic and glass warehouse in San Vio that became the Church of Saint George in Venice in 1892. There's a window dedicated to Browning.

Helen, Countess of Radnor, lived in the Palazzo Morosini in San Vio, and was the choir mistress of Saint George. The chaplain from 1905 till 1912 was the Rev Canon Lonsdale Ragg.

Palazzo Barbarigo. Photo by Leandro Neumann Giuffo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

 

At right, just past San Vio, we see Ca’ Barbarigo 16th century. It was fashionable to decry the mosaics (applied only in 1886) as seriously vulgar, but they continue to delight the tourists who know no better. It was for 50 years the 'town' home of Frederick and Caroline Eden, who owned the fabulous 'Garden of Eden' on Giudecca, to which they were rowed daily by gondola. Caroline Eden was the older sister the famous gardener Gertrude Jekyll.

The Edens also owned a private steam launch for excursion into the lagoon. Visitors to the Garden of Eden included Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust, who came to Venice when researching his hero, Ruskin, whom he was translating into French. He stayed in Venice from October to May of 1900.



Giovanni Boldini's portrait of Luisa Casati with
peacock feathers, from 1912

Luisa Casati in 1912
by Adolf de Meyer

Palazzo Venier dei Leoni – now better known as the Guggenheim Collection – was just a private palace on the Grand Canal in 1913. And it was at that time the home of Luisa Casati, Marquise Casati Stampa di Soncino (1881 –1957), who was one of Venice’s more colourful figures. She rather insisted on it, saying ‘I want to be a living work of art.’

Luisa Casati in 1912
by Alberto Martini

Among those who endorsed her artistry were Jean Cocteau, Cecil Beaton and her lover Gabriele D’Annunzio, who from 1914 lived just a gondola ride across the Grand Canal at the Casetta delle Rose.Luisa Casati was known for walking around with a pair of cheetahs on leashes. She wore living snakes as jewellery.

She moved into the palazzo in 1910, and immediately began a series of legendary soirées with artists, writers, fashion designers and musicians of the time. Naturally she was a patron of Fortuny, whose dresses were featured in part one of the blog. Forty years after her death, she was the inspiration for John Galliano’s 1998 summer collection for Christian Dior. Alexander McQueen revisited her style in his 2007 collection, as did Karl Lagerfield in 2009.

During her lifetime, artists were encouraged to paint Casati’s portrait or sculpt her likeness. Augustus John, among many others, obliged. In spite of her old money, and evident love of decadence, she was a muse to the Futurist Marinetti.


Luisa Casati in 1922
photographer unknown

She inspired characters in various films, including La Contessa (1965) in which she was played by Vivien Leigh, and A Matter of Time, when her role was taken by Ingrid Bergman. (All photos of Luisa Casati courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Just a little further up on the left hand side we see the austere contours of the Hotel Gritti. Ruskin and his wife Effie stayed here in five rooms at eastern end of first floor, during 1851 -2 while he was researching the second and third volumes of The Stones of Venice. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the palace was converted into a hotel.

Later Somerset Maugham would write on its terrace, ‘Few things are equally wonderful as sitting here, while the sun goes down and immerses the Canal in bright colours.’

Hemingway also favoured this hotel, as would Winston Churchill, Graham Greene, and Orson Welles.

 

Virginia Woolf by
Geoge Charles Beresford,
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

We are in the Honeymoon Hotel Mile. Palazzo Ferro Fini at left was once The Grand Hotel, where Virginia and Leonard Woolf spent part of their honeymoon in 1912 (the middle of her three visits). She found the noise and crush of Venice quite overwhelming.

The Hotel Europa Regina on the left was the site of George Elliot’s honeymoon in Venice, 1880. At 60 the writer had married John Cross, 20 years her junior, who jumped out of the hotel window. Much unfortunate hilarity has been expended on this incident which presumably resulted from intense private pain and probably illness.



Contarini Fasan

The pretty Contarini Fasan was one of Ruskin’s favourites. It is sometimes known
as Desdemona's palace.

Two palazzi up is the somewhat austere Ca’ Alvisi. It was the home of the redoubtable Mrs Katherine de Kay Bronson, American society hostess in Venice from the 1880s almost until her death in 1901, when it was inherited by her daughter, by then Countess Rucellai.

In her time Mrs Browning entertained Whistler, Browning, Sargeant and Henry James. Whistler wrote, 'Venice is only really known in all its fairy perfection to the privileged who may be permitted to gaze from Mrs Bronson's balcony'.

At right we see Ca’ Dario, a lurching 15th century structure, studded with lozenges of porphyry and serpentine. This building is famous as the most haunted house in Venice, the site of an unfair share of the city’s unexplained deaths and suicides. Rawdon Brown who lived there 1838- 42, was ruined by the restorations. But many people were fine there

In fact, Pen and Fanny Browning rented it while doing up the Rezzonico, and I have seen no untoward reports of their time there. The poet Henri Regnier also enjoyed his time there. Claude Monet made this painting of it in 1908, when a guest at Ca' Barbaro (of course). Painting courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. And Lady Enid Layard recorded that in May 1912 she went to visit the Bournes, a pleasant French family who had recently taken up residence at Ca' Dario.

A little further on the right we see Ca’ Semitecolo, a small 15th century Gothic palazzo with six arched windows opposite Giglio, left of Salviati’s mosaic-facaded town headquarters. The writer Constance Fenimore Woolson (photo right,courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) in 1894 occupied the top two floors of this building. She committed suicide there – jumping from her bedroom window onto the hard stones below. Her body was found by the gondolier Angelo Fusato. Encroaching deafness had brought depression. It is also thought she was hopelessly in love with Henry James, who was appointed one of her executors and was much traumatised by having to deal with her personal effects and her clothes after her death.


San Gregorio, visible from the Canal on the right, was an antique warehouse in 1913.

Finally, the pre-war traveller would pass the great white church of Santa Maria della Salute and come out into the bacino at the end of the canal, with the customs house, or Dogana. The scene would be very similar to today, apart from the Bagni Galleggianti – floating swimming baths with gaily striped awnings – that were anchored every summer off the tip of Dorsoduro. They were equipped with hot and cold, freshwater and saltwater showers, and fifty changing rooms. There were also ‘sirene’ – mermaids – which were specially adapted gondolas with metal cages underneath, so that ladies could bathe modestly and safely. Camillo Boito makes use of one of these boats for an amorous encounter between Raniero and Livia in his novel, Senso, of 1883. Having just downloaded a fascinating article about these structures, I see a translation and a whole blog about them coming on.

Overbearing, outsize cruise ships of today, not to mention the pollution they bring, make such a delightful installation impossible today. And more, for so many reasons, is the pity.

So this is where we leave the Grand Canal and our last wave of pre-war Grand Tourists.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride.

Michelle Lovric’s website

Great Continental Railway Journeys

The True & Splendid History of The Harristown Sisters will be published by Bloomsbury on June 5th 2014

Unattributed photos are by the author or her sister, Jenny Lovric. Venetian etchings and ephemera from the author's own collection.