Browning's House

Robert Browning (1812–1889) was, along with Tennyson, the most celebrated English poet of the Victorian age; he is probably equally well known for his passionate marriage to Elizabeth Barrett, also a poet. They wed against Barrett’s father’s wishes in 1846 and eloped to Italy. This etching by Frank Brangwyn depicts the Palazzo Rezzonico (or Ca’ Rezzonico) on the Grand Canal in Venice, a grand house which belonged to the poet’s son Robert Barrett Browning, a painter. The elder Browning was staying there when he died on December 12, 1889, and a private funeral service was held in the palace. By the time Brangwyn made the etching, on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth, the Ca’ Rezzonico had changed ownership; still, it continued to carry associations with Robert Browning and with visual artists such as John Singer Sargent, who had a studio there in the 1880s. Today it is a museum of eighteenth-century Venetian art.