It wasn’t just the grandeur of Venice that drew John Singer Sargent back to the city again and again – it was what he found in its darker corners, writes Travis Elborough

The society portraitist and painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was the son of peripatetic American expatriates who shuffled around Europe living off a modest bequest for most of their lives. In the September of 1880, Sargent joined his parents and sisters in Venice. (He had visited Venice three times before – once as a baby and again aged fourteen and seventeen.)

In the previous eighteen months, Sargent had travelled to Spain, Morocco, Tunisia and Holland. These excursions were to furnish him with a store of ideas and the raw material for two paintings he subsequently exhibited favourably at the Salon in Paris: Smoke of Ambergris and El Jaleo.

Venice presented itself as an equally ripe – perhaps even riper – prospect and when his family departed for Nice, France, he decided to stay on for the winter to find a suitable subject for a Salon study. He took lodgings in the Hotel dell’Orologio, 290 Piazza San Marco, near the clock tower as it name implies.

He also acquired a studio in the Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal, a faded fifteenth-century palace that had been sliced up into a honeycomb of workrooms, memorably described as “a veritable barracks of artists”.

Sargent was to remain in Venice for the next six months. Most likely he met James Abbott McNeill Whistler during this first extended spell in the city. He was back again in August 1882 and stayed on until that October. This time he was to live and work at the Palazzo Barbaro, where he shared a studio with his cousin Ralph Wormeley Curtis, a Harvard-educated painter.

The Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal was an imposing fleet of sumptuous upper-floor apartments owned and occupied by Curtis’s Bostonian parents, Ariana and Daniel Sargent Curtis. With Daniel and Ariana famed for their hospitality, the Palazzo Barbaro was a first port of call for famous and artistically inclined Anglo-American visitors to Venice. Robert Browning, who lived nearby, came often to read his poems at their salons and Henry James immortalised Palazzo Barbaro in his novel The Wings of the Dove.

The attraction of Venice for James was both its splendour and its squalor. “The misery of Venice,” he wrote, “stands there for all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle – a thoroughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it was part of the pleasure.”

Sargent was just such a devotee, instantly magnetised by Venice’s grubbier underbelly during these two pivotal stints here. He turned his back on its monumental architecture, thumbed his nose at its history and ignored its gleaming domes entirely. Instead, he devoted himself to its dingier canals, back-alleys with worn cobbles populated by layabouts and lone women, and gloomy rooms occupied by smoking peasants and dark-eyed ladies threading beads.

If a Venetian opus for the Salon ultimately eluded him, Sargent experimented with painting en plein air from a gondola with watercolours. Even if he occasionally resorted to hiring models to pose in watery locations, he caught the grit in this pearl-stuffed oyster of a city in a batch of quite revolutionary pictures. In the Venetian Water Carriers he documented the bigolanti (peasant water carriers), whose profession was soon rendered obsolete by civic improvements. Street in Venice offered a snapshot of the rundown Calle Larga dei Proverbi near the Campo San Canciano, while the black-clad subject of Woman in a Gondola appears adrift and alone in the canal.

In 1884, Sargent’s painting Madame X (or Madame Pierre Gautreau) was exhibited at the Paris Salon. The painting, which depicted Gautreau in a coquettish pose and in a revealing gown, caused out-and-out scandal and Sargent was ostracised by Parisian society.

Following this stormy reception the artist relocated to London. However, he continued to travel widely in Europe and beyond and returned to Venice many times. Between 1898 and 1913, he visited Venice close to annually, lodging mostly in the Palazzo Barbaro or, when that wasn’t possible, the Grand Hotel Britannia in the San Marco neighbourhood.

Both JMW Turner and the French Impressionist Claude Monet had stayed in the latter establishment. After checking in for the first time, Monet’s wife wrote home to report: “We have finally arrived at the Hotel Britannia, with a view, if such a thing were possible, even more beautiful than that of Palazzo Barbaro.”

The Hotel Luna, also in San Marco, was another establishment that Sargent and his sister Emily used.

On these later trips some of the artist’s previous obsessions resurfaced in pictures such as An Interior in Venice, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1900, and Gondoliers’ Siesta, with its dozing boatmen from 1904.

Sargent, who wearied of the portraiture that had brought him such fame, became more preoccupied with Venice’s architecture and its topography. He was to produce over thirty watercolours of the canals, many of them of small architectural details, such as archways and bridge spans, that caught his eye. These pictures, in the opinion of the art historian Warren Adelsen “create the illusion that we are exploring the city with the artist”.

Although Venice is famed for its palaces and churches, Sargent, who managed to avoid painting Saint Mark’s Basilica entirely, devoted equal attention to the humbler buildings of the Grand Canal, the Riva degli Schiavoni and the Zattere. The Libreria on the Piazzetta, for example, was of more interest to him than the Doge’s Palace, and the ships on Giudecca Canal, with their masts and rigging, were as fascinating to him as the church spires.

If regarded as something of a relic of the pre-modernist age by the time of his death in 1925, Sargent managed to show sides of Venice that had evaded countless artists before him, his pictures of the city adding fresh layers of mystique to a watery metropolis that has long thrived on its own fairy tales.

This is an extract from The Artist’s Journey: The Travels that Inspired the Artistic Greats by Travis Elborough (White Lion, £20). Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Travis Elborough’s other books include The Long-Player Goodbye: How Vinyl Changed the World; Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles; and Atlas of Vanishing Places: The Lost Worlds as They Were and as They Are Today, which won Illustrated Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2020. 

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