Moran saw Venice for the first time in 1886, but he was well acquainted with the city before he arrived, for Venice had been one of Turner's favorite subjects. Having seen the city first through Turner's eyes, Moran traveled to familiar sites to secure the watercolor sketches he would need to produce studio paintings when he returned home. In these Venetian pictures he used a compositional technique quite similar to that he had employed with his Green River paintings. Moran often "anchored" these paintings with recognizable architecture and then freely invented foreground elements, in place of the Indian caravans that frequently made their way across the foregrounds of the Green River pictures. Gondolas and fishing vessels filled with brightly costumed figures often float in the foreground of the Venetian works. In the United States, views of Venice were enormously popular near the end of the nineteenth century, in part because the city seemed a poetic, Old World refuge from an industrialized America that was pushing full speed into a new age.