Studio: international art (54.1912)

Felix Ziem

pendent and he retired from the official coterie to
rely only on his own talent and reputation which
were then at their zenith.

Once more, ten years later, at the exhibition of
1878, Ziem was tempted to send his contributions
to the Salon, and the Government then made him
an Officier of the Legion of Honour. He had
been made a Knight of the Legion of Honour in
1857 on August 6, and had received the First or
Grand Medal of the Salon in 1852. He had also
been awarded a medal in 1850 and in 1855.

In the artist's best days, Theophile Gautier
wrote of him : " Every artist has an ideal country
of his own, often far removed from the one in
which he lives, or was born. His talent revels
there alone as under a propitious sky, and he flies
back to it in a straight line as soon as he is free.
There alone his talent flourishes and produces its
loveliest flowers. The home of Ziem is Venice.
He may leave it, travel elsewhere, go to Constanti-
nople, but his real artistic domicile is Venice.
His home is on the ' Riva dei Schiavoni,' in the
palaces of Canaletto and of Guardi, which were
also occupied by Bonington and Joyant. With
one drop of water in which a bit or colour is
dissolved, he builds, with a few touches of the

brush, a rough-cast palace ot vermilion with a
buff sort of balcony, speckled posts, a chimney
twisted liked a turban, a Lombard piece of
architecture adorned with vanishing frescoes of
Giorgione."

After reaching the height of his celebrity Ziem
settled permanently in Paris, where he occupied
different ateliers until he finally purchased an old
house, which he transformed into a studio, in the
Rue Lepic. It is rare even in picturesque old
Montmartre to find a similar relic of the past. An
old wall rises high up from the pavement and
winds round a corner. What there is behind the
old wall we can only guess from the outside. An
old house with a storey and half overlooking the
crooked wall is badly perched on the slope. Its
windows are irregular and have an odd squint
down the hill. In front of a wooden porch there
is the bold iron prow and figurehead of an antique
gondola brought by Ziem from Venice, and said to
have once belonged to a Grand Inquisitor.

Ziem's atelier was on the top floor, reached by a
narrow wooden stair. The light enters by a big
bay window, and brightly coloured canvases hang
all over the walls. They represent gorgeous sun-
bursts and sunsets, Red Venetian palaces, vermilion

"ON THE BOSPHORUS ':
3°4

FiOM THE OH. PAINTING BY FELIX ZIEM