Although of late years much has undoubtedly been done to help us towards a better understanding of the various individualities in the Venetian school of painting during the 18th century, there are still many members of that school awaiting for full justice to be done to their artistic merits, and for their work to be properly distinguished from that of other masters. One of them is Alessandro Longhi, the greatest portrait painter of the Venetian settecento, many of whose works still pass under the name of his father, Pietro Longhi. The portrait of a procurator of S. Mark, belonging to Mr. Henry Harris, and now for the first time reproduced by kind permission of the owner, must undoubtedly take rank among the finest works of Venetian 18th-century portraiture. The design is most effective, with the large dark mass of the procurator, in his ample robes, towering mountain-like over the low horizon, silhouetted against the cool blue of the sky and a luminous, fantastic Venetian decor below-on the left the Piazzetta, on the right a palace on a canal, no doubt the ancestral home of the dignitary represented. The spacing of the whole is admirable for its largeness and unity as well as rhythmic harmony of design, and the feeling for the effective counter-changing of silhouettes, dark on light and light on dark-especially well seen in the passage about the right hand-makes the artist appear as a not unworthy heir of the tradition of Titian and Tintoretto. Likewise, the lights playing across the satin robes-red, of a rich and deep murrey shade- have a sparkle and vivacity, reminding one of similar passages in paintings of the Venetian cinquecento. The view that this is a work by Alessandro Longhi appears to be one the correctness of which, all things considered, is not to be contested. It is true that the conception of the whole is marked by a stateliness and grandeur which are almost 17th century in character, and not to be associated immediately with an artist who, having been born in 1733, lived till 1813 and whose other works show far more of the rococo playfulness of spirit; it is true also that the style of drawing is unusually firm and solid for Alessandro Longhi and the general tonality cooler and less mellow than in his typical works. But, on the other hand, there is certainly no lack here of analogies with Alessandro Longhi's style. The drawing of the hands, for instance, if it differs from that in the superb portrait of an admiral, in brilliant scarlet and gold, in the Padua Gallery, is undoubtedly akin to that in the portrait of Goldoni in the Museo Correr and in the great portrait group of the Pisani family belonging to the Marchese Bentivoglio; the style of the landscape background also seems to me one which one might well expect from an artist who lived till the beginning of the 19th century, and on the whole it appears to me far more likely that this is an exceptional work by Alessandro Longhi, done perhaps with a definitely archaistic intention, than that another name must be substituted for his as that of the author of the present picture. According to an inscription at the back of the picture, it represents the "Procuratore Mocenigo", but, owing to the inadequateness of the information concerning Venetian genealogy at my disposal, I have so far been unable to follow up the clue thus offered for the identification of the person represented and the dating of the picture.

The picture, which was lent to the exhibition of Venetian 18th-century painting at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1911, is in excellent state of preservation and measures 89 by 63 in. The former reproduced in the current official guide to the Museo Correr, the latter in Signor Rava's monograph on Pietro Longhi.