Venice has canals where other cities have streets, so a painter there first has to decide where to stand: on a quay, at a window, in a boat or high above a square. That spot decides what the city becomes on canvas, down to a bell tower cropped from the picture a few years before it fell.
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How These Were Chosen
Venice sits on islands in a lagoon, and its main streets are canals. Every building shows up twice, once in stone and once in the water, and the reflection breaks apart each time a boat goes by.
That makes the painter's position decisive. The light shifts with the water, the boats never stop, and the same few landmarks look completely different from a quay, from a palace window, from high above a square or from a gondola.
So the list is built on place. Every view below shows a stretch of the real city, and each entry starts from where the painter stood and what that spot let him show or hide. Capricci, the imaginary views that mix real and invented buildings, were left out.
12. John Singer Sargent, An Interior in Venice (1899)
A young woman pours tea at the left of this tall, dim room. Toward the center and the right, an older couple sits among stucco walls, gilded furniture and a glass chandelier that surface only here and there from the dark. The room is the grand salon of the Palazzo Barbaro, a palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and John Singer Sargent painted it in 1899.
The canal is right outside the windows, yet Sargent keeps it out of the picture. It enters only as the light from those windows, falling on the four figures and leaving the rest of the room in shadow.
Those four figures were the family who lived there. The older couple are Daniel and Ariana Curtis, wealthy Bostonians who had made the palace their home and who were distant cousins of the painter. Their son Ralph stands at the left, and the woman with the teapot is his wife, Lisa. Her small household task keeps a room built to impress from turning into a stage set.
Sargent meant the canvas as a present for Ariana Curtis, whom he nicknamed the Dogaressa. She turned it down, because she thought it made her look too old and her son too casual. Henry James, the American novelist and a frequent guest at the palace, took the painter's side and wrote to her that he "absolutely and without reserve adored" the picture.
The refused gift soon found another home. Sargent had been elected a member of the Royal Academy in London in January 1897, and every new member owes the Academy one of his own works, called a Diploma Work. He handed over the canvas his hostess had turned down, and the Academy accepted it in 1900.
At a Glance
Artist: John Singer Sargent (1856 to 1925), American
Painted: 1899
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 66 × 83.5 cm (26 × 32.9 in)
Where to see it: Royal Academy of Arts, London
11. Maurice Prendergast, Piazza di San Marco (about 1898 to 1899)
Three Italian flags fill the front of this watercolor, so large that the bell tower of St. Mark's behind them is cut off at the top. Far below, tiny figures dot the Piazza San Marco, the great square of Venice. Maurice Prendergast, an American painter, made it around 1898 to 1899, and the tower he chose to crop would not be standing much longer.