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.

Sargent’s many views of Venice are among his most experimental works. Beginning in the 1880s, he frequently vacationed in Venice, where he created watercolors for his own pleasure as a diversion from the commissioned oil portraits for which he was famous. He often sketched from a gondola, and here, with the low vantage point and the prominence of the boat’s stern, the viewer feels as if he were sitting with the artist. The dissolving washes of transparent color against the white paper brilliantly capture the play of light and shadow on the watery reflections and solid surfaces.

Although many of Sargent's Venetian watercolors are undated, this work probably was created during his visits between 1902 and 1913, when he was particularly engaged by the architecture, atmosphere, and reflected light of Venice.