Ruccellai, Edith Millicent Bronson (1861-1956) Three Commonplace Books with Photographs, circa 1875-1900. Three quarto format books containing numerous quoted passages of verse, with 19th century photographs of people, landscapes and landmarks pasted to many pages, almost all identified in ink; the earliest book dated 1875 and begun by EMB while a teenager, making a journey on the Nile with her family; including a photograph of Gustave Dore presented to EMB; a very early photograph of Isabella Stewart Gardener's Fenway Court, later known as the Gardener Museum in Boston; a photograph with cut signature of Swiss-American biologist Louis Agassiz; together with a few sketches and watercolors likely by EMB; the three volumes with failing bindings and missing pages, each 8 x 6 1/4 in. (3)
Bronson was born in Newport, RI, but her family settled in Venice in 1876, where they occupied Ca'Alvise, a grand Venetian mansion at the mouth of the Grand Canal opposite Santa Maria della Salute, which functioning as a hotel as of 2024. Whistler was a family friend and a distant relation who noted in a letter to his mother, "Venice is only really known in all its fairy perfection to the privileged who may be permitted to gaze from Mrs. Bronson's balcony." EMB became a countess when she married Cosimo Rucellai (1864-1930) in 1895. Her mother, Katherine de Kay Bronson, was close friends with Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Isabella Stewart Gardener, Robert Browning, and other artists who also visited the family at their home in Venice.
