After “Turner and Venice”, another show which charts the response of a great artist to the city and its lagoon.
Venice was, in fact, the place best loved of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the most important of American ‘impressionists’, who was born in Florence and lived for many years in Europe.
Housed within the neoclassical rooms on the first floor of the Museo Correr, the exhibition (24 March - 30 September 2007) is curated by Warren Adelson and Elizabeth Oustinoff
The exhibition will include some sixty works (paintings and watercolours) dating from 1880-1913. There are loans not only from the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, but also from numerous private collections
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Like J.W.Turner and other great nineteenth-century artists, Sargent was fascinated by Venice.
The man himself had grown up in cultured cosmopolitan circles in Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland and Germany. In Paris he had studied under Carolus-Duran and then enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts before embarking on a career as a portrait-painter.
A friend of Monet’s, he would in the second half of the 1870s undertake a number of study trips, experimenting
ever more extensively with peinture en plein air. He made his first visit to Venice in 1879, returning more than ten times over the next 40 years and taking this city as the subject of his art more frequently than any other: in effect, his particular love of Venice would, from the 1890s to 1913, be reflected in the 150 or so oils and watercolours. A good sixty of these works figure in the Museo Correr exhibition.
Left: Sortie de l’église, Campo San Canciano, Venice, 1882
Above: Corner of the Church of San Stae, ca 1913
The Salute, Venice, ca. 1902-07
The first Venetian show to be entirely dedicated to the artist, this takes the form of a very atmospheric gondola ride down the Grand Canal; Sargent, in fact, often painted from within a gondola, rendering the unusual views afforded by this low vantage point.
Palaces, churches, campi and canals are all enlivened by the play of light on water and architectural details. However, alongside views of famous monuments such as the Rialto Bridge, the Doge’s Palace and the Church of the Salute, there are also evocations of daily life in the
Venice of the time: interiors of workshops, crowded streets, women at work, busy cafés and osterie, etc.
And whether interiors or external scenes, each of these works reveals the dominant features of Sargent’s art: exploration of light effects, freedom and precision of line, perfect mastery of form.
Sargent and Venice, Museo Correr
from 24 March to 30 September 2007
Open: daily 10am-7pm
Admission: 9 €, special concession 7 €
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