“A Street in Venice”
For today, one of my favorite Sargent paintings.
This moody post-Impressionist style oil on canvas painting was made circa 1880 to 1882 by the American artist, John Singer Sargent. It is titled “A Street in Venice.” At this time in his life, John Singer Sargent was in his early 20s and was traveling through Spain and Italy to study the masters and gain inspiration for his work.
In this painting, the viewer is looking down a narrow alleyway. A man is standing in the alley, talking with a woman in a doorway. He is wearing a dark hat and a black coat with the neckline lined in fur. The woman is wearing a black shawl around her shoulders and is looking directly at the viewer. Her skirt is a reddish orange, which mirrors the coloring of the brick on the opposite wall and offers the only splash of color in the scene. It almost feels as if we are intruding on a private conversation. The locals are dressed in dark clothing, which was traditional at the time, giving an almost chiaroscuro effect.
Sargent used his brush and thick layers of paint to create a stucco appearance on the walls of the buildings, giving a more visceral feeling to the scene. The cropped appearance of the composition was a style that had become more popular after the impressionism art movement. Sargent was influenced by the realism of the Spanish painter, Diego Velázquez, and the Italian photographer, Carlo Naya, which can be seen in this piece in the silhouetting of the people and the close cropping of the overall composition.
This is the first painting that Sargent had created with this name, with the second one dating to 1882. Sargent did a series of Venetian scenes in the early 1880s in which he played with the contrasts of light and shadows. Most artists who went to Italy to paint around this time focused on creating scenes highlighting the old architecture scattered across the country. Sargent was different. He focused on the shadowy streets and the culture of people that he found in those streets. Sargent returned to Venice many times during his lifetime, and created hundreds of sketches, paintings, and descriptions of what he saw.
“A Street in Venice” is currently on display at The Clark Art Institute of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the United States.
For more on John Singer Sargent, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
