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It was night, and there had been rain. A wind was blowing in from the Adriatic that had scattered the tourists from the Piazza San Marco. Waiters stood in the doorways of the cafés and restaurants looking humble, almost troubled. There was something beautifully desolate about the square.

On nights like this you could own the city, moving slowly out of the square as though away from danger, not using a map, and with no destination in mind, merely trying to keep as far away from the Grand Canal as possible, and with three or four hours to spare before sleep to explore the old city.

Venice is not a city that offers ease or comfort to those who are alone. It is full of shadows, blind alleys, twists and turns, dead ends. At first you feel wonder, almost a sense of pure freedom. A few times you might find a bar down a dark street or in a small square off a side canal, but you are never encouraged to linger. You must venture out again with your own footfalls for company and no sense of precisely where you are or how you might get back.

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In the morning, it is always different—the beauty less haunted, the wandering slower and more careful simply because the churches and museums and cafés are open. The Grand Canal is to be embraced and crossed and sought out, rather than avoided. I pride myself on knowing the way to the Frari, where I can sit once again and look at Titian’s painting of the Assumption and try to clear my mind of all else so I can watch the folds of the dress, the faces, the soaring composition.

Not far away is the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the exterior of which was painted in oils by John Singer Sargent in the early 1880s and later in watercolor. Upstairs in the main salon, you are given a mirror so you can look at the art on the ceiling without straining your neck too much. I do not linger long in this room because in a smaller room hangs Tintoretto’s Crucifixion, a huge epic, and there are chairs where you can sit and notice something new each time, delighting in the scale and ambition, moved by the mixture of brutality and busyness in the scene, what Henry James called Tintoretto’s “passionate energy” and “boundless invention,” erasing the obsessions of the night before.

Of the tourist in the city, James wrote: “The hours he spends among the pictures are his best hours in Venice.” Of himself he wrote: “I am ashamed to have written so much of common things when I might have been making festoons of the names of the masters.”

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As much as it belongs to doges and merchants and builders and princes and tourists, Venice belongs to writers and painters. It is they who have made the shadows so interesting, tempted them toward substance. Venice is not only a city built on wealth and water; it is a city sustained by words, framed in images.

As the 19th century progressed and American writers and painters came to the city, they became as interested in the oblique and odd perspectives in the watery city, the less-than-obvious vistas, the tiny and alluring details, the side canals, the shadowy spaces, the poor, as much as in the larger and glamorous spectacle offered by the Grand Canal and its palaces, the opulence, the sheer beauty of the light against the grandest buildings.

Sargent first came to the city in 1870, at the age of 14, returning with his mother and sister three years later and beginning to work in the city seriously in the early 1880s. James arrived in 1869 at the age of 26, returning many times over the next 40 years, making the city’s ambiguities, its ethereal beauty and its marooned darkness, its aura both gilded and shabby, a backdrop or a metaphor for the rich ambiguities of his characters. His friend Constance Fenimore Woolson committed suicide here in January 1894. Within a decade he had brought one of his more tragic heroines, the heiress Milly Theale, to die in a palace in Venice.

For Sargent, the city offered a chance to move between the bright, raking glory of Mediterranean light against beautiful buildings and the more darkly dramatic possibilities of obscure hallways and decaying, desolate backstreets. He could move between the bright topography of the city, including some of its most splendid interiors, and its hidden dinginess.

Both Sargent and James became friends with Daniel and Ariana Curtis, who owned the 15th-century Palazzo Barbaro, whose interior Sargent painted. From 1887, James began to stay in the palace during his Venetian sojourns, having a bed, at one stage, moved into the library for his use. He found the Curtises “intelligent, clever, and hospitable.”

“As you live in it day after day,” he wrote of the palace, “its beauty and its interest sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its moods and its hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions.” The Curtises invited many visiting artists and writers to the palace, including Robert Browning, who read his poems in the very salon that Sargent had painted. Thomas Hardy was a guest of honor during his visit to the city.

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Now it was my turn. In 2005—Sargent 80 years dead and James almost 90 years gone from the world, and the Curtises, too, long gone (Daniel in 1908 and Ariana and her son Ralph in 1922)—Patricia Viganò, a descendant of the Curtises, and her husband invited a small group of us to look at the part of the palace that remained in the family’s possession. It was a bright afternoon in early July; we walked in by a side entrance and then up the grand staircase. The windows of the apartment were wide open to the Grand Canal.

There were two things I needed to see. The first was the library. I walked into it and held my breath. It was amazing that this long room, where James had slept, remained untouched and in the family’s hands. I knew it from photographs; it was a low room with a vaulted ceiling. Only the bed was missing, but it was easy to see where it had been and easy to imagine James at night here, his work done, away from the rich social life that the Curtises drew around them. This was the Venice of opulence and ease, which meant so much to him and to Sargent and their American contemporaries.

But there was another Venice, too—a darker, more shadowy place. I knew about it as much as James did. I needed to be sure, however, that when he came here after Woolson’s suicide that he would have been able to see the last place she lived, the building from which she flung herself, from the windows of the Palazzo Barbaro. I stood at one of the windows and looked out, as he must have done. He merely had to glance to the left and he would have seen it, the place of nightmare. His Venice came thus, as it came to many others, in several guises—a place of exquisite and faded glamour and beauty and a place that was haunted and strange, the city I walked in at night, filled with silence and ancient fantasies.

“Dark Waters” was originally published in the February/March 2007 issue of Culture & Travel magazine.