John Singer Sargent

For John Singer Sargent, regular trips to Venice were valuable vacations from the often wearisome business of portrait commissions. His Italian watercolors were personal works, created for pleasure or as gifts for friends, not for the art market. He frequently painted outdoors, exploring the city’s less-visited areas and painting unusual architectural elements or striking patterns of colorful stones and canal surfaces. Here Sargent presents the prow of his gondola in the foreground, with gondolier’s pole dividing the space and emphasizing his unusual vantage point. The combination of bold colors and large areas of exposed paper in this view of a bridge over the Maria Santa Formosa canal suggests that he painted this image under the strong midday sun, his favorite hour to work in Venice.