San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, from the Lagoon.

As a young artist in his native New York, Moore was a member of the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, founded in 1863 and very much inspired by Ruskin’s writings. Through the Harvard Professor Charles Eliot Norton, he was introduced to Ruskin and worked with him in Venice in the winter of 1876-77.

A note by the artist’s daughter, on an old label accompanying this picture, records that it was “painted in Venice by my father Charles Herbert Moore, between Sept 1876 and April 1877. Of some of the details on the façade of San Giorgio in this building, Mr Ruskin said he would give his little finger to be able to paint them as my father has done.”