All in all, Sargent’s love for Venice and its architecture is what motivated him to share this closeness to Venice with others by painting these two series. During Sargent’s lifetime, his contemporary, Henry James, stated that “Venice has been painted and described many thousands of times and of all the cities of the world is the easiest to visit without going there” (qtd Fernandez 6). Yet despite the prevalence of depictions of Venice, Sargent wanted to show Venice from a different perspective. To be true, this was rather counterintuitive for such a gifted portraitist to keep portraying the old subject matter of Venetian buildings, but then again, Sargent was a paradox in many ways. He was an Italian-born American Impressionist who strayed from the Impressionist obsession with vistas. And as a traditionalist, he strayed from the traditional view of Venice by using different perspectives of Venice’s most famous sites from unpicturesque vantage points. Most importantly though, Ormond describes Sargent when he says “He was in love with a Venice of the past, with the spirit of the Renaissance which had inspired its great buildings…” (Kilmurray and Ormond 40). Wanting to capture this “spirit of the Renaissance” after painting the first series of Venice, he turned to architecture. And with his experience climaxing as a portraitist, he knew what he had to do to both maintain the local Venetian’s point of view and revere the splendorous details of Venetian buildings. He had to draw the essence out of the buildings just as he did with people in his paintings. In response to James, we can add some more illustrations to the Venetian collection, and Venice becomes even easier to visit without being there. Yet thanks to Sargent, it is in a way more intimate than any of his predecessors depicted Venice, and through his interpretations, we can really feel the glory of Venice that he so cherished.
Sargent, John Singer. Santa Maria della Salute. 1904. The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York.
