No other city in the world has captured the hearts and imaginations of so many artists and writers as Venice. One of the most famous of all these was Henry James, who, for more than thirty years, from 1881, returned regularly to the city he called "the enchantress," recalling and evoking its unique atmosphere in countless letters and essays, as well as more allusively in fictional works such as The Aspern Papers and The Wings of the Dove.
During these same years two other expatriate Americans also fell under the enchantress's spell: the artists John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. They shared with James an affinity of response to Venice-to its elegiac mood, its fading opulence and pervasive odor of decay—that distinguished their work from that of all other artists who painted Venice. Whistler and Sargent depicted "a Venice in Venice": the city's unfrequented canals and campi, its crumbling