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Lot Essay
A perfectly poised meditation between tranquility and motion, Gondolier’s Siesta is an exceptional example among the series of watercolors John Singer Sargent made of Venice in the first decade of the twentieth century. This important body of work, which shows “Sargent at his very best,” reveals Venice’s iconic canals and architecture through the artist’s singular eye (W. Adelson, “In the Modernist Camp,” in Sargent Abroad: Figures and Landscapes, eds. M. Christian and N. Grubb, New York, 1997, p. 52). Gondolier’s Siesta incorporates two of Sargent’s most important Venetian subjects: the architectural detail and the city’s iconic boatmen. Masterfully capturing the effects of light through a complex layering of hues and highlights, Gondolier’s Siesta reveals the highly detailed nature of Sargent’s eye, his deep knowledge of optics and his immense technical skill in handling the notoriously difficult medium with such bravura. Added to this virtuosity here is the compelling personality imbedded into the figures, uniquely captured at rest in the foreground of this picturesque Grand Canal view.
Venice was Sargent’s muse and most significant subject, first visualized in his travel sketchbooks made in his youth. The artist’s annual stay in the lagoon allowed him to constantly evaluate and reappraise the city’s unique light and fantastic vistas from his gondola, prowling the length of the Grand Canal and its many tributaries for new subjects taken from novel perspectives. Indeed, Gondolier’s Siesta is foremost an articulation of Venice’s idiosyncratic light which animated generations of artists and writers resident in the serene city. The shifting surface patterns of the water are ravishingly displayed in Sargent’s quick washes and brilliant dabs of pigment. The modern compositional construction delights in the powerful leftward receding perspective across the architectural façade of Palazzo Contarini delle Figure, past the Grand Canal and toward the San Polo embankment. Sargent envisions the scene from a disorienting perspective, the artist almost abreast of his subject, establishing a sense that the viewer is embarked on Sargent’s gondola. Here, the “Venice of the here and now is expressed through glancing light and rippling water, the splendor of the past brought home to us in a vivid style that makes us feel we are there in the artist’s gondola as he captures the city,” as the Sargent scholar Richard Ormond describes of his best watercolors (R. Ormond, “Down the Grand Canal 1900-1913,” in Sargent’s Venice, New Haven, 2006, p. 72).
Sargent held a deep fascination with architectural elements, particularly from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, filling sketchbooks and sheets with drawings and watercolors after the monuments he observed during his Italian tours. Sargent’s exacting depiction of Palazzo Contarini delle Figure’s Palladian façade is the focus of Gondolier’s Siesta. The watercolor accurately depicts the weathered corrosion of the sixteenth-century palazzo, the dark staining occurring around the portal and ground floor windows still visible on the building today. Sargent applies his watercolor wet-on-wet around the palazzo’s entryway, creating a shadowed, murky effect suggestively depicting the opaque depths of the interior as it appears to a water-bound observer.
The foreground is purposefully rendered in a more fluid style. Sargent studied optical effects and constructed his watercolors to visually replicate how his eyes ingested the scene he painted, thus executing the lower portion of the composition to appear as if seen in one’s peripheral vision. The two gondoliers lounging aboard their sandoli—smaller, less ornate vessels lacking the gondola’s distinctive raised ends—are executed with a few confident strokes. The seeming speed of these gestures belies the incredible care Sargent took with constructing and designing his watercolors; as a contemporary of Sargent’s described of his watercolor process: “at the start of a painting he is very careful and then as it develops he lays on the paint with more freedom. When about done he looks at it with piercing eyes and making a stroke here and there, gives the whole a look of spontaneous dash. Although nine-tenths of the work is very careful indeed, there is a look of bold virtuosity when the work is done” (W. Adelson, “In the Modernist Camp,” op. cit., p. 32).
“[T]he light here is a mighty magician, and, with all respect to Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret [sic], the greatest artist of them all.” -Henry James about Venice
Sargent’s close friend Henry James writes how in Venice, “the light here is a mighty magician, and, with all respect to Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret [sic], the greatest artist of them all. You should see in places the material with which it deals—slimy brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt and decay” (H. James, “Venice: An Early Impression,” in Italian Hours, New York, 1909⁄1992, p. 52). James and Sargent, both American expatriates enamored with the lagoon, work in tandem to furnish a daringly realistic, unvarnished version of Venice at odds with the touristic idealism which pervaded the popular perception of the famed destination. In Gondolier’s Siesta, Sargent turns his attention to the play of light emphasized by James, reveling in its distortive effects reflecting against the grand canal and onto the palazzo’s battered exterior.
“your brown-skinned, white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light... a perpetual symbol of Venetian ‘effect’.” -Henry James, Italian Hours
Sargent and James shared another subject: the Venetian gondolier, an icon of the inimitable lagoon city. James emphasizes the iconic nature of these figures, writing, “your brown-skinned, white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light, seems to you, as you lie in contemplation beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of Venetian ‘effect’” (H. James, “Venice: An Early Impression,” op. cit., p. 52). Sargent similarly focuses on gondoliers in motion, even as he captures his titular subjects at rest in the present work. A client of Sargent’s noted that during his many stays, the artist “was only interested in the Venetian gondoliers,” a description borne out by the many studies Sargent made observing their complicated motions rowing across the waterways (B. Wertheimer, quoted in T. J. Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist, exh. cat., Seattle Art Museum, 2000, p. 220). Two drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, made during Sargent’s visit from 1880 to 1882, capture their twisting contortions as they scull with their long wooden oars. Sargent’s fascination with this subject can be traced even earlier. In a letter to his close friend Vernon Lee while visiting Venice in 1873 at the age of seventeen, Sargent writes how “it is very delightful... to trace the majestic movements of the gondoliers...the origins of that peculiar love of graceful motions and fine positions which caracterises [sic] the Venetians and especially Tintoretto” (J. S. Sargent, quoted in S. L. Herdrich, “John Singer Sargent and Italian Renaissance Art,” in Sargent and Italy, ed. B. Robertson, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2003, p. 103). Already fascinated with gondoliers, from a young age Sargent identified the subject with the very essence of Venetian art, which he recapitulates in the present work.
“It is very delightful... to trace the majestic movements of the gondoliers...the origins of that peculiar love of graceful motions and fine positions which caracterises [sic] the Venetians and especially Tintoretto.” -John Singer Sargent
While gondoliers fascinated Sargent, the present work is a rare composition where the men and their boats take a prominent position within one of his watercolor compositions. Furthermore, Gondolier’s Siesta is unique among Sargent’s Venetian watercolors in showing his subjects resting on their gently rocking boats instead of capturing the gondoliers’ graceful movements maneuvering their oars. The artist, however, had executed several drawings of male subjects in repose, including Siesta on a Boat from 1876 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), a pencil drawing showing several of his friends dozing on a boat. The greatest influence for the reclining figures in the present work may be Sargent’s decades-long engagement with Michelangelo, the Renaissance master whom he most admired. Sargent studied Michelangelo’s Notte from the Medici Chapel in Florence in his student years, evidently fascinated with Michelangelo’s inspired rendering of the contorted posture of his slumbering symbol of night. The two gondoliers here allow Sargent to incorporate his admiration for Michelagelesque poses into the composition, translating the dynamism of the figura serpentinata style beloved of the Renaissance into a recumbent mode. While inspired by the canon of Italian art history, Sargent’s figures remain remarkably singular, the artist elaborating the complexity of their twisted torsos with a few economic strokes and dark washes.
Sargent’s watercolors of Venice were acclaimed from the moment of their creation, and eagerly sought after by leading institutions. By the time of his first selling exhibition of watercolors at M. Knoedler & Co., New York in 1909, the Brooklyn Museum purchased eighty-three of the watercolors en bloc. This major acquisition initiated a frenzied competition between other museums to obtain some of Sargent’s Venetian watercolors. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, having lost out to the Brooklyn Museum in 1909, purchased forty-five watercolors from Sargent’s next show in 1912—before the exhibition even opened. The Metropolitan Museum of Art then began its own campaign to acquire a selection from this series, the museum’s director writing to Sargent that same year: “The Trustees of our Museum have asked me to communicate to you their desire to purchase some of your watercolors, which I gladly do as I am anxious that we should have some” (E. Robinson, quoted in S. L. Herdrich and H. B. Weinberg, American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000, p. 3).
“Venice of the here and now is expressed through glancing light and rippling water.” -Richard Ormond
The immediate enthusiasm from the most eminent American museums for Sargent’s watercolors attests to their excellent quality and importance to the great American artist’s broader oeuvre. More personal and expressive than Sargent’s society paintings, Gondolier’s Siesta articulates the artist’s intense engagement with the Venetian vista, offering an enthralling glimpse into Venice’s exceptional nature. James writes how “the mere use of one’s eyes in Venice is happiness itself, and generous observers find it hard to keep an account of their profits in this line” (H. James, “Venice: A First Impression,” op. cit., p. 52). Sargent rises to this challenge, his watercolor brilliantly rendering the joyous beauty of the city and replicating the happiness gained by experiencing Venice firsthand.
Venice was Sargent’s muse and most significant subject, first visualized in his travel sketchbooks made in his youth. The artist’s annual stay in the lagoon allowed him to constantly evaluate and reappraise the city’s unique light and fantastic vistas from his gondola, prowling the length of the Grand Canal and its many tributaries for new subjects taken from novel perspectives. Indeed, Gondolier’s Siesta is foremost an articulation of Venice’s idiosyncratic light which animated generations of artists and writers resident in the serene city. The shifting surface patterns of the water are ravishingly displayed in Sargent’s quick washes and brilliant dabs of pigment. The modern compositional construction delights in the powerful leftward receding perspective across the architectural façade of Palazzo Contarini delle Figure, past the Grand Canal and toward the San Polo embankment. Sargent envisions the scene from a disorienting perspective, the artist almost abreast of his subject, establishing a sense that the viewer is embarked on Sargent’s gondola. Here, the “Venice of the here and now is expressed through glancing light and rippling water, the splendor of the past brought home to us in a vivid style that makes us feel we are there in the artist’s gondola as he captures the city,” as the Sargent scholar Richard Ormond describes of his best watercolors (R. Ormond, “Down the Grand Canal 1900-1913,” in Sargent’s Venice, New Haven, 2006, p. 72).
Sargent held a deep fascination with architectural elements, particularly from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, filling sketchbooks and sheets with drawings and watercolors after the monuments he observed during his Italian tours. Sargent’s exacting depiction of Palazzo Contarini delle Figure’s Palladian façade is the focus of Gondolier’s Siesta. The watercolor accurately depicts the weathered corrosion of the sixteenth-century palazzo, the dark staining occurring around the portal and ground floor windows still visible on the building today. Sargent applies his watercolor wet-on-wet around the palazzo’s entryway, creating a shadowed, murky effect suggestively depicting the opaque depths of the interior as it appears to a water-bound observer.
The foreground is purposefully rendered in a more fluid style. Sargent studied optical effects and constructed his watercolors to visually replicate how his eyes ingested the scene he painted, thus executing the lower portion of the composition to appear as if seen in one’s peripheral vision. The two gondoliers lounging aboard their sandoli—smaller, less ornate vessels lacking the gondola’s distinctive raised ends—are executed with a few confident strokes. The seeming speed of these gestures belies the incredible care Sargent took with constructing and designing his watercolors; as a contemporary of Sargent’s described of his watercolor process: “at the start of a painting he is very careful and then as it develops he lays on the paint with more freedom. When about done he looks at it with piercing eyes and making a stroke here and there, gives the whole a look of spontaneous dash. Although nine-tenths of the work is very careful indeed, there is a look of bold virtuosity when the work is done” (W. Adelson, “In the Modernist Camp,” op. cit., p. 32).
“[T]he light here is a mighty magician, and, with all respect to Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret [sic], the greatest artist of them all.” -Henry James about Venice
Sargent’s close friend Henry James writes how in Venice, “the light here is a mighty magician, and, with all respect to Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret [sic], the greatest artist of them all. You should see in places the material with which it deals—slimy brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt and decay” (H. James, “Venice: An Early Impression,” in Italian Hours, New York, 1909⁄1992, p. 52). James and Sargent, both American expatriates enamored with the lagoon, work in tandem to furnish a daringly realistic, unvarnished version of Venice at odds with the touristic idealism which pervaded the popular perception of the famed destination. In Gondolier’s Siesta, Sargent turns his attention to the play of light emphasized by James, reveling in its distortive effects reflecting against the grand canal and onto the palazzo’s battered exterior.
“your brown-skinned, white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light... a perpetual symbol of Venetian ‘effect’.” -Henry James, Italian Hours
Sargent and James shared another subject: the Venetian gondolier, an icon of the inimitable lagoon city. James emphasizes the iconic nature of these figures, writing, “your brown-skinned, white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light, seems to you, as you lie in contemplation beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of Venetian ‘effect’” (H. James, “Venice: An Early Impression,” op. cit., p. 52). Sargent similarly focuses on gondoliers in motion, even as he captures his titular subjects at rest in the present work. A client of Sargent’s noted that during his many stays, the artist “was only interested in the Venetian gondoliers,” a description borne out by the many studies Sargent made observing their complicated motions rowing across the waterways (B. Wertheimer, quoted in T. J. Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist, exh. cat., Seattle Art Museum, 2000, p. 220). Two drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, made during Sargent’s visit from 1880 to 1882, capture their twisting contortions as they scull with their long wooden oars. Sargent’s fascination with this subject can be traced even earlier. In a letter to his close friend Vernon Lee while visiting Venice in 1873 at the age of seventeen, Sargent writes how “it is very delightful... to trace the majestic movements of the gondoliers...the origins of that peculiar love of graceful motions and fine positions which caracterises [sic] the Venetians and especially Tintoretto” (J. S. Sargent, quoted in S. L. Herdrich, “John Singer Sargent and Italian Renaissance Art,” in Sargent and Italy, ed. B. Robertson, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2003, p. 103). Already fascinated with gondoliers, from a young age Sargent identified the subject with the very essence of Venetian art, which he recapitulates in the present work.
“It is very delightful... to trace the majestic movements of the gondoliers...the origins of that peculiar love of graceful motions and fine positions which caracterises [sic] the Venetians and especially Tintoretto.” -John Singer Sargent
While gondoliers fascinated Sargent, the present work is a rare composition where the men and their boats take a prominent position within one of his watercolor compositions. Furthermore, Gondolier’s Siesta is unique among Sargent’s Venetian watercolors in showing his subjects resting on their gently rocking boats instead of capturing the gondoliers’ graceful movements maneuvering their oars. The artist, however, had executed several drawings of male subjects in repose, including Siesta on a Boat from 1876 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), a pencil drawing showing several of his friends dozing on a boat. The greatest influence for the reclining figures in the present work may be Sargent’s decades-long engagement with Michelangelo, the Renaissance master whom he most admired. Sargent studied Michelangelo’s Notte from the Medici Chapel in Florence in his student years, evidently fascinated with Michelangelo’s inspired rendering of the contorted posture of his slumbering symbol of night. The two gondoliers here allow Sargent to incorporate his admiration for Michelagelesque poses into the composition, translating the dynamism of the figura serpentinata style beloved of the Renaissance into a recumbent mode. While inspired by the canon of Italian art history, Sargent’s figures remain remarkably singular, the artist elaborating the complexity of their twisted torsos with a few economic strokes and dark washes.
Sargent’s watercolors of Venice were acclaimed from the moment of their creation, and eagerly sought after by leading institutions. By the time of his first selling exhibition of watercolors at M. Knoedler & Co., New York in 1909, the Brooklyn Museum purchased eighty-three of the watercolors en bloc. This major acquisition initiated a frenzied competition between other museums to obtain some of Sargent’s Venetian watercolors. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, having lost out to the Brooklyn Museum in 1909, purchased forty-five watercolors from Sargent’s next show in 1912—before the exhibition even opened. The Metropolitan Museum of Art then began its own campaign to acquire a selection from this series, the museum’s director writing to Sargent that same year: “The Trustees of our Museum have asked me to communicate to you their desire to purchase some of your watercolors, which I gladly do as I am anxious that we should have some” (E. Robinson, quoted in S. L. Herdrich and H. B. Weinberg, American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000, p. 3).
“Venice of the here and now is expressed through glancing light and rippling water.” -Richard Ormond
The immediate enthusiasm from the most eminent American museums for Sargent’s watercolors attests to their excellent quality and importance to the great American artist’s broader oeuvre. More personal and expressive than Sargent’s society paintings, Gondolier’s Siesta articulates the artist’s intense engagement with the Venetian vista, offering an enthralling glimpse into Venice’s exceptional nature. James writes how “the mere use of one’s eyes in Venice is happiness itself, and generous observers find it hard to keep an account of their profits in this line” (H. James, “Venice: A First Impression,” op. cit., p. 52). Sargent rises to this challenge, his watercolor brilliantly rendering the joyous beauty of the city and replicating the happiness gained by experiencing Venice firsthand.