duveneck's

In Duveneck's case I cannot help breaking my golden rule never to speak in print of the living rules were made to be broken. And why shouldn't I? I might as well not write at all about our nights in Venice as to leave him out of them, he who held them together and fashioned them into what they were.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell - Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties

What the student, in Duveneck's and McFarlane's time saw going on round him in Munich was, as well as I could make out, chiefly balls and pageants. To this day I cannot help thinking of life in Munich as one long spectacle and dance. Duveneck, who could talk with calmness of his painting, was stirred to animation when he recalled the costumes he had invented for himself and his friends.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell - Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties

Pride, too, coloured Duveneck's account of the appearance of the Socialist Carpenter of his creation who made a huge sensation by inciting to riot in the streets of an elaborate Old Munich the origin of Old London and Old Paris and all the sham Old Towns that Exhibitions have long since staled for us.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell - Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties

Outside, tables looked upon the Lagoon and the façade of San Giorgio, white in the night. In a big, new, gilded room sailors and sergeants played checkers and more serious Venetians worked out dismal problems in chess. But Duveneck's corner was in the older, shabby, stuffy, low-ceilinged room, and having once settled there we never wanted to move.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell - Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties