(Providence 1912–1998 Milan)
Venice, 1954, signed and dated with initials WC’54, on the reverse graffiti with the study of the same landscape, monogrammed WC, oil on wood panel, 95 x 112 cm, framed

Photo Certificate:
The William G. Congdon Foundation, Milan, archive no. 138.50

Provenance:
Private Collection, Italy

William Grosvenor Congdon was born on Providence, Rhode Island on 15 April 1912. His parents, Gilbert and Caroline, belonged to two wealthy and illustrious Protestant industrialist dynasties.
Notwithstanding his privileged environment, William’s childhood was characterised by a difficult relationship with his father, by whom he felt misunderstood and rejected.
The desire to find a space in which he could define himself, far from paternal aspirations rooted in business and Puritanism, provided the stimulus for Bill’s first forays into the world of art.
The opportunity to distance himself from his surroundings arrived unexpectedly in 1942, when the artist enlisted in the American Field Service, a voluntary health organisation set up during the Second World War.
In May 1945, Congdon was among those entering the newly liberated Bergen Belsen concentration camp. He would spend a month there as part of the aid operation. Faced with the bodies and the suffering of civilians, Congdon discovered painting intended as self-giving.
On his return at the end of the war, Congdon moved to turbulent New York, and began a series of trips between America and Europe, which would bring him into contact with Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons, the gallerist of the new generation of “action painters”, with whom he would maintain a profound bond of friendship. In the early 1950s, Venice emerged in Congdon’s geographical and emotional sights. The lagoon city seduced him with her beauty, giving rise to a quasi-passionate relationship “the orange moon that rose over my nightmare of fear in New York became the golden Basilica of Saint Mark... no longer the vague disc of a distant planet, but a safe harbour in which I could find a berth. I began to blend gold into my colours. This gold seemed to emanate from within my basilicas and became for me, as for the mediaeval mosaicists, a spiritual symbol”.
Saint Mark’s Square is the subject of tens of pictures painted in his ever more extensive sojourns in the city.
Peggy Guggenheim contended that Congdon’s Venetian cityscapes are, after Turner’s, those that best, and most originally, interpret Venice’s beauty.