Early on in his career, Sargent utilizes a cropped perspective and what Richard Ormond calls “a telescopic view of the alley” (Robertson 71) to portray an alternate Venice that tourists would never get a chance to see. Sargent creates the Venetian street scenes like they were interiors, by cropping the tops and sides of the buildings, and only revealing minimal architectural detail. Consequently, he produces an enclosed feeling for the figures in Street in Venice (1882) and A Street in Venice (1880-82), not to mention giving us a perspective as if we could walk into these paintings and down the streets. For example, in Street in Venice, Sargent’s portrayal of the buildings on either side of the street is run-down and shoddy, and he uses just enough color to distinguish the corners and sides of the buildings and solid blocks of colors to depict windows and shutters. He also chooses a diagonal perspective that draws the viewer deep into the picture to fully experience this Venetian backstreet alley (Roberston 71), yet the focus of the painting are the figures, particularly the female in the center. Sargent employs this “telescopic” perspective in other paintings as well, as the walls also narrow in behind the foreground figures in A Street in Venice (1880-82). 
As Linda Ayres describes, Sargent blurs the foreground of the painting to draw attention to the middle and back, and the lines of the exposed bricks on the left wall reinforce this strong perspective (Hills 58). However the bricks are the extent of Sargent’s architectural detail. With quick brushstrokes as the bricks on the left wall and solid strips of colors as windows and doors, Sargent’s buildings seems to mesh together. This is hardly an exaltation of the magnificent buildings we associate with Venice, such that it caused Arther Baigneres, a writer for the Gazette des beaux-arts, to question “‘Why go to Italy if it is only to gather impressions like these?’” (qtd Ratcliffe 73). Baigneres noticed that these paintings are of Venice without its grandeur and he questions why Sargent would focus on such undistinguished buildings and unimportant people. While these two paintings convey a sense of Venice’s mystery, the focus is weighted more towards the people rather than the architecture, meaning the paintings lack the ability to fully capture the beauty of Venetian architecture.
Perhaps Sargent realized this failure, because in contrast to these two paintings, he completely removes people out of the picture in one of his last oil paintings from the series, A Street in Venice (1882). As he depicts a secluded area, Sargent focuses on the “geometry of architectural spaces…without figures,” (79) according to Kilmurray and Ormond, significantly removing people out of the way in order to focus solely on architecture. 
Sargent’s narrowing walls lead the eyes deep into the picture (Robertson 74), and the architecture is kept to a minimum besides the hanging structure that further narrows the view of the end of the alley. Yet while Sargent may provide viewers a local perspective of the alleyways, in doing so, he does not achieve the encompassing sense of Venice in this painting. Can this painting speak for itself without the presence of people? Unfortunately, its vacancy does not, and perhaps Sargent obtained Baigneres’ viewpoint on the matter in that these paintings did not represent all that Venice was to him. With this painting, Sargent begins to get the idea of focusing on buildings like a portrait, as opposed to including both people and buildings. While Sargent’s first series in Venice does portray a hidden side of Venice, it does not fully capture the entirety of Venice’s architectural grandeur, which is what makes Venice so admired.
Sargent, John Singer. Street in Venice. 1882. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Sargent, John Singer. A Street in Venice. 1880-1882. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Sargent, John Singer. A Street in Venice. 1882. Collection of the Ormond Family. Location Unknown.
