Sargent's Venice

John Singer Sargent returned to Venice many times during his life, endlessly fascinated with this enchanting city. In paintings filled with vivid colors and dazzling light, he sought to capture its vitality and unique ambience, often working while afloat in a gondola. This gorgeously illustrated book presents nearly seventy of Sargent’s oil and watercolor paintings of Venice, many of them famous but others only rarely seen. The book also contains fascinating new photographs of actual sites depicted in Sargent’s paintings. Sargent’s early works in Venice were created in 1880-1882, and he undertook a second, larger body of work in the city during visits from 1900 to 1913. His responses to Venice - its local figures, its buildings and waterways, its extraordinary light - reflect his changing interests over time as well as his lifelong ability to extend his own reach as a creative artist. The book considers various aspects of Sargent’s work and milieu in a series of informative essays by international scholars. They discuss the evolution of Sargent’s style, the topography of his work in Venice, his connections with Henry James and other Americans in Venice, Italian artists in Venice in the nineteenth century, and American artists in Venice in the nineteenth century.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.