John Singer Sargent's Venice: on the canals

Mary Newbold Singer Sargent (1826-1906) required that her young son John complete one drawing every day as he accompanied her on their morning outings. She and her husband, Fitzwilliam (1820-1889), had decided to homeschool their children, and, aside from the three Rs, Mary insisted that art training was essential, so it was only natural that John work with her while she recorded in watercolor the places they visited. "She ruled that no matter how many sketches were begun each day one must be finished," Sargent's cousin Mary Hale wrote in her memoir of the artist. (1) Mary Sargent's passion for travel and habit of painting watercolors of the surrounding countryside proved to be her greatest gift to her son. This legacy provided him not only with the foundation for a rewarding and profitable career as a portrait artist but also with a means for private escape as a landscape painter.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Few artists were as widely traveled as Sargent, but of the many European cities he knew well, it was to Venice that he returned again and again. The large body of work he produced there, primarily in the early years of the twentieth century, greatly intrigued us in our role as the authors of the John Singer Sargent catalogue raisonne and led us on a glorious adventure, following his footsteps--or rather his gondola--as he recorded this magical and mysterious city in watercolors and oils.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Mary and Fitzwilliam Sargent decided to leave Philadelphia in 1854 following the death of their first child, and they chose southern Europe as their new home. Mary had persuaded her husband to leave his successful medical practice, and he acquiesced to her need to shift their lifestyle as a way to recover from their tragic loss. They left the confining routine of antebellum Philadelphia for what would become a never-ending European tour. John was born in Florence on January 12, 1856, and his sister Emily followed just over a year later, on January 29, 1857, in Rome. The two remained close throughout their lives. The "baby," Violet, was born in Florence on February 9,1870, and, while the extensive age gap precluded childhood relationships, Violet became one of Sargent's cherished models on summer holidays. The family's modest annual income allowed them to live a coach-class existence, and that was perfectly fine for Mary who loved adventure far more than luxury. They owned no homes; apartments were rented, as was the furniture, and their few possessions traveled with them. The Sargent family itinerary followed the climate: winters in southern France or Italy and summers in the Alps, with weeks of rail and road travel in between. So it was that John Singer Sargent never had a conventional home.

This peripatetic existence continued until 1874 when Sargent moved to Paris to study fine art. His parents recognized that he had an exceptional talent and reasoned that, if he were to be a professional artist, the only secure means of making a living would be as a portrait painter. He was accepted into the atelier of Carolus-Du-ran (1837-1917), a stylish and affluent portrait painter whose students were predominantly foreigners (non-French), and there Sargent met many American students with whom he developed lasting friendships. He had completed his formal training by 1877 but remained in Paris until 1885 when he was persuaded by friends, notably Henry James, to move to London. The hostile French press that railed against his Salon entry of 1884, Madame X (Madame Gautreau) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), had dampened his spirits and diminished his prospects for portrait commissions in Paris. (2) With his student days behind him, Sargent set up a studio in London and embarked on a professional career that escalated rapidly. By the 1890s requests for his portraits were overwhelming. And in 1893 he accepted a commission to create a large mural for the Boston Public Library, a project that necessitated lengthy stays in the United States, forging a pattern of transatlantic travel that continued for the rest of his life.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

Sargent's artistic relationship with Venice began in two protracted visits; six months in 1880 and 1881 and three months in 1882. (3) He went there to gather ideas for a Salon-sized canvas and concentrated on oils depicting scenes from modern life. During these visits to Venice he painted activities away from the canals, focusing chiefly on men and women playing out their lives in the backstreets and darkened hallways. Sargent used young and seductive models and posed them in theatrical compositions with ambiguous and sometimes suggestive narrative content. Whether indoors or outside, his subjects were enclosed in rectangular boxes of space with controlled light. The palette was primarily earth tones with accents of red or pink. The light, too, was theatrical and raked in dramatic angular bolts. He produced a number of evocative and sophisticated paintings, but none of them resulted in a Salon entry. Sargent was in Venice briefly in 1892, when he wrote to his sister Violet that he planned to stay for two or three weeks at the Palazzo Barbaro, owned by his cousin Daniel Curtis (1825-1908) and his wife Ariana (1833-1922), and he was there in 1898, when he stayed again with the Curtises. (4) But it was not until after 1900 that he returned with regularity. Between 1902 and 1913 he made at least eight visits to the city and produced well over one hundred watercolors and about a dozen oils. By this time, Venice was no longer part of Sargent's career-building strategy. His motivation was strictly personal, his medium had shifted to watercolor, his palette had lightened, and his interest had gravitated to the activity and architecture along the canals. Very few of the paintings he produced were exhibited or sold in his lifetime; he kept them for himself or occasionally gave them as gifts to friends. Sargent had returned to a daily routine of painting outdoors, just as he had done with his mother decades earlier.