Throughout his career as a painter, Edward Cooke travelled extensively in Europe, visiting France, Holland, Italy, Spain, North Africa and Scandinavia. Paintings and drawings resulted from all his travels, but it is evident that the places that provided the strongest fascination for him besides the southern coastline of England were the beaches and estuaries of Holland and the topography of Venice and Italy.

Cooke’s first visit to Venice was in 1850 and he returned there a further nine times before his last visit in 1877. It was on his second trip to Venice in 1851 that Cooke met and became friends with the critic John Ruskin.

This pencil drawing was made on oiled tracing paper, and is a copy of an original dating from October 1862: hence the inscription ‘Gave original to Mr. Decimus Burton’. It shows in the foreground a gondola in the Venetian lagoon before the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, the location of the Armenian convent. In the middle distance is another gondola.