Sargent’s idea of painting the buildings like a portrait lay dormant for twenty years as he decided to first focus on people. Following this hiatus, Sargent attempted to capture the essence of Venice again; however, this time, it required him to move out of the alleyways and into something more mobile—the gondola. Hence, Sargent hopped into a gondola to navigate the Venetian waterways and painted buildings from a gondola’s perspective, which is also the reason why he painted this series in watercolors. Because he was moving around the canals of Venice, he needed a more portable medium, and watercolors were a natural choice as they did not require an elaborate easel and they were quick to dry. The influence of his early Venetian works, particularly this local perspective, carried on in this series of watercolors, but this time, Sargent chose well-known buildings of Venice for his “portraits” of their more architectural details, and for the most part, continued to exclude people from his paintings, particularly the tourists that were invading his precious city. Expressing his disdain for tourists, Sargent called them “swarms of larky smart Londoners whose goings on fill the Gazette” (qtd Halsby 117), and purposefully used the gondola perspective, which allowed him to paint tourist attractions but not in the style of a tourist postcard. Instead, Sargent focused on parts of buildings as Bruce Robertson notices: “He generally left enough signs for the building to be identified-but only by someone truly knowledgeable about Venice” (Robertson 13). In this way, Robertson points out that Sargent was familiar enough with Venetian buildings as native Venetians were, and this is what he wanted to portray in these true “Portraits of Places.” By this time, Sargent had been commissioned by hundreds of people to try and capture the essence of their loved ones; it was now his turn to do the same for his beloved city.
Sargent, John Singer. Side Canal in Venice. 1902. Private Collection, Location Unknown.
