“A Street in Venice”
This moody oil on wood post-Impressionist style painting, titled “A Street in Venice”, was painted in 1882 by the American portrait artist, John Singer Sargent.
In this piece, Sargent depicts a woman walking toward the viewer down a narrow alleyway in the city of Venice. Her black shawl is wrapped tightly around her upper body and her eyes are downcast. To the right, two men dressed mostly in black can be seen talking. One leans back against the wall of a building, turning his gaze to the solitary woman. The other man is looking at his companion, deep in conversation. Sargent used his brush and thick layers of paint to create an almost 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 due to the impressionism art movement.
Art historians have been able to pinpoint the exact location of this painting, along the narrow street, Calle Larga dei Proverbi, between Calle Vincenzo Manzini and Salizada del Pistor. This is in the northern part of the island just a few blocks from the Grand Canal, the main water thoroughfare that traverses the city.
This is the second painting that Sargent had created with this name, with the first one dating to 1880-1881. 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. Sargent did a series of Venetian scenes in the early 1880s in which he played with the contrasts of light and shadows. Most artists at this time who went to Italy to work focused on the old architecture. Sargent was different. He focused on the shadowy streets and the culture of people that he found in those streets. He returned to Venice many times during his lifetime, and created hundreds of sketches, paintings, and descriptions of what he saw.
Most artists who went to Italy to paint around this time focused on creating scenes highlighting the old architecture scattered across the country. Sargent, however, focused on the shadowy streets and the culture of people in those streets. 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. The realism of this piece along with the earthy tones led critics to see it as “banal and worn-out”. In 1887, Sargent gave the painting away to a friend of his as a wedding gift.
“A Street in Venice” is currently in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., 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.
