Piazza San Marco

Piazza San Marco (1875) by Henry Bacon, now in the collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum, engages with architectural and urban subject matter, situating the artist within the 19th-century tradition of veduta and topographical painting developed from Dutch and Italian precedents. Henry Bacon was an American painter who spent most of his career in Paris, achieving success at the Salon with a range of subjects from New England genre scenes to Egyptian genre paintings resulting from his travels in North Africa.

Bacon applied paint with careful, controlled brushwork in a naturalistic palette influenced by his Paris training and his Orientalist travels. His subjects range from Egyptian genre scenes to American social situations, each handled with documentary clarity and competent academic organization.