Provenance

• By 1905: bought (possibly from Whistler in 1903), by Richard Albert Canfield (1855-1914) ;
• 1914: bought on 12 March by Knoedler's, New York dealers;
• 1914: sold in April to Mrs Willard M. Straight (née Dorothy Payne Whitney) (1887-1968), New York, who married (1) Willard Dickerman Straight (1880-1918) in 1911 and (2) Leonard Knight Elmhirst (1893-1974) in 1925.
• 1940: sold at auction, Lehman et al. sale, Parke-Bernet, New York, 2 May 1940 (lot 252) as 'Long Venice', and bought by Charles Sessler (1854-1935) , art dealer and bookseller, Philadelphia;
• 1940: bought from Sessler by William Koester, Baltimore, MD, 8 April.
• 1976: sold at auction, Harris Auction Galleries, Baltimore, 29 June 1976, and bought by Louis Glowacki (d. 2003), and Vera Glowacki (née Ostapek) (d. 2020), Baltimore, MD;
• 2020: passed by family descent to their nephew, Arthur W. Bell, MD;
• 2021: bought by Debra Force, Fine Art, Inc., New York:
• 2021: bought by a private collector, USA.

Exhibitions

• 1881: Venice Pastels, Fine Art Society, London, 1881 (cat. no. 16) as 'Little Venice; in turquoise'.
• 1905: Œuvres de James McNeill Whistler, Palais de l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1905 (cat. no. 152) as 'Long Venice'.

The lithographer Thomas Robert Way (1861-1913) sketched the pastel when it was exhibited in 1881. His thumbnail sketch (reproduced above) has enabled the pastel to be identified. 1

The Daily News on 31 January 1881 called it 'singularly successful.'