John Singer Sargent – Riva Degli Schiavoni, Venice

John Singer Sargent, Riva Degli Schiavoni, Venice, 1904

Despite the beauty of John Singer Sargent’s oil on canvas paintings such as the wonderful “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose”, it is his watercolours that I truly adore. These watercolours have a wide range of motifs; from ladies lounging in the grass on a summer day, to scenes of Venice, to Arab women and even crocodiles. Wherever he travelled, the urge to paint watercolours followed him like a shadow. And these days, in particular, it is his watercolours of Venice I love the most. I can never decide whether I love his watercolour “Riva Degli Schiavoni” or “The Piazzetta”, both from 1904, more, but today I decided that perhaps I love the former more. “Riva Degli Schiavoni”, as the title reveals, shows The Riva Degli Schiavoni, a monumental Venetian waterfront in the sestiere of Castello named after the Slavic merchants from Dalmatia which brought cargo from the other side of the Adriatic sea. From 1420 to 1797 most of Dalmatia was under rule of the Republic of Venice and it is not surprising then that some other landmarks in Venice carry the “Schiavoni” in their name; the early Slav merchants such as Palazzo Schiavoni, and Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, to name a few. Still, it is clear that Singer Sargent wasn’t lost in the dreams of the past while he was sketching this wonderful watercolour, the ardour of the blues, their richness against the rough blackness of the gondolas, it is clear that he was right then and there, sketching feverishly, not being stingy with his use of the rich, vibrant blues. The sketchiness brings liveliness and immediacy that paintings by Canaletto, as interesting as they are, just cannot bring. While Canaletto laboured over the precise architectural details, Sargent allowed his brush to roam the paper freely because for him the details were of secondary importance while the task of capturing the mood of the place took precedence.

John Singer Sargent, The Piazzetta, Venice, 1904

From Peter Ackroyd’s book “Venice: Pure City”:

“The most obvious sign of continuity is also the most familiar. The gondolas have been plying the waterways of the city for a thousand years, with only the smallest modifications in shape and appearance. (…) The gondolas are first mentioned in a document at the end of the eleventh century, although they must have been in existence for many decades before that date. (…)  There were ten thousand gondolas in the sixteenth century, many of them festooned with ornaments and carvings. This encouraged displays of showmanship and rivalry among the wealthier Venetians, who were allowed few opportunities of conspicuous consumption in public. Such a spirit was of course to be resisted by a Venetian state that curbed individualism of any sort in the name of collective brotherhood. So the ornamentation was, in a decree of 1562, forbidden.

John Singer Sargent, Gondoliers’ Siesta, 1904, watercolour

That is why the gondolas became black. Even though black was not considered by the Venetians to be an unfavourable colour, the gondolas ever since have regularly been seen as floating coffins. Shelley compared them to moths that have struggled out of the chrysalis of a coffin. James Fenimore Cooper felt that he was riding in a hearse. Wagner, fearful in a time of cholera, had to force himself to board one. Goethe called it a capacious bier. And Byron saw it:

Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe,
Where none can make out what you say or do.

Byron is here describing the amours that might or might not take place in the private space of the cabin. The gondolier penetrating the interior canals of the city has also been given a phallic importance, so that in Venice sex and death are once more conflated. Henry James wrote of the experience that “each dim recognition and obscure arrest is a possible throb of your sense of being floated to your doom.…” A ride on a gondola can prompt some very powerful instincts.“

John Singer Sargent, A Bridge and Campanile, Venice, 1902-4, watercolor over black chalk on thick wove paper

John Singer Sargent, Venice, 1903, watercolour

John Singer Sargent, Scuola di San Rocco, c. 1903, watercolour on paper

Kees Van Dongen – La Casati in Venice: The Pretty Lies, The Ugly Truth

“The image in the mirror may in some sense be a guarantee of identity and of wholeness. The root of narcissism lies in anxiety, and the fear of fragmentation, which may be assuaged by the sight of the reflection. (…) Venice always associated itself with the Virgin. But of course the image in the mirror is a false self; it is hard, abstract and elusive. It has been said that the Venetians are always aware of the image of themselves. They were once masters of the display and the masquerade. They were always acting.”

(Peter Ackroyd, Venice: Pure City)

Kees Van Dongen, La Casati, 1918

Dutch Fauvist painter Kees van Dongen once famously exclaimed that “painting was the most beautiful of all lies”, and it seems very fitting then to continue with his notion of painting being a lie and write about this beautiful portrait called “La Casati” from 1918. As the title suggests, the portrait shows the rich Italian heiress Luisa Casati who lived a life rich with adventures, scandals, depts, eccentricities and – art. Not that she was an artist, but she lived her life as if it were a work of art and, as wondrous a work of art as her life indeed was, it needed to be captured in paintings and photographs. Not only did Casati commision her portraits, but also many artists, painters and poets were flying around her as moths around a candle, drawn irresistibly to her legendary persona and intense individualism. Casati’s face, even in photographs, is a kind of dramatic face that one doesn’t forget too soon and I guess, in that regard, van Dongen’s portrait is realistic. Apart from the face perhaps, the portrait isn’t realistic at all, the figures are in fact very stylised and the colours are nonmimetic, far too intense and vibrant, though typical for Kees van Dongen’s Fauvist style. Still, even on a deeper layer it is ‘realistic’ because Luisa Casati’s extravagant persona and the nocturnal, fantasy city of Venice have a lot in common. Casati lived in Venice, from 1910 to 1920, at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on Grand Canal in Venice.

Even when she left the city, the city stayed inside of her because the two, Luisa and Venice, are as two sides of the same coin in terms of character; both posess the watery fluidity and bluntly refuse to be defined or define themselves, both are eccentric, self-obsessed narcissists with a fetish for deception and self-deception through lies and masquerade, anxiously putting on false facades, as is indeed typical for Venetian architecture, and layers and layers of rouge, red lipstick, mascara, feather boas, jewels and feathers, so that the final facade is so rich with layers which are impossible to peel off and get to the core. Luisa, like the waters and canals of Venice, is capricious and changeable. Garish red hair, large black eyes like bottomless abysses, unhealthy absinth-greenish complexion, thin and elongated figure, midnight blue formless, fluid gown. The scene at once nocturnal and Venetian, and yet out of time and place. Nothing about it seems realistic or accurate, and Kees van Dongen for one never strived to capture anything realistically, if painting is lying, then he lied beautifully. He would always put a special emphasis on the woman’s figure, and he would exaggerate it, elongate it purposefully, and the clients loved it.

Here is something from Peter Ackroyd’s book “Venice: Pure City” which I found particularly striking:

“But of course water is the life and breath of Venice’s being in quite another sense. Venice is like a hydropic body filled with water, where each part is penetrated by another. Water is the sole means of public transport. It is a miracle of fluid life. Everything in Venice is to be seen in relation to its watery form. The water enters the life of the people. They are “fluid”; they seem to resist clarity and precision. (…) In myth and folklore water has always been associated with eyes, and with the healing of eyes. Is it any wonder, then, that Venice is the most visually seductive of all the cities of the world?

The endless presence of water also breeds anxiety. Water is unsettling. You must be more alert and watchful in your perambulations. Everything shifts. There is a sense of otherness. The often black or viscous dark green water looks cold. It cannot be drunk. It is shapeless. It has depth but no mass. (…) But if water is the image of the unconscious life, it thereby harbours strange visions and desires. The close affiliation of Venice and water encourages sexual desire; it has been said to loosen the muscles, by human imitation of its flow, and to enervate the blood. Yet Venice reflects upon its own reflection in the water. It has been locked in that deep gaze for many centuries. So there has been a continuing association between Venice and the mirror.

(…) The image in the mirror may in some sense be a guarantee of identity and of wholeness. The root of narcissism lies in anxiety, and the fear of fragmentation, which may be assuaged by the sight of the reflection. The Virgin Mary, in the Book of Wisdom, is lauded as “a spotless mirror of God”; Venice always associated itself with the Virgin. But of course the image in the mirror is a false self; it is hard, abstract and elusive. It has been said that the Venetians are always aware of the image of themselves. They were once masters of the display and the masquerade. They were always acting. (…) It is a place of doubleness, and perhaps therefore of duplicity and double standards. (…) The reflection is delightful because it seems to be as substantial and as lively as that which is reflected. When you look down upon the water, Venice seems to have no foundations except for reflections. Only its reflections are visible. Venice and Venice’s image are inseparable. In truth there are two cities, which exist only in the act of being seen.”

Edmund Dulac, The Carnival, St Marks, Venice, n.d.

The blueness is absolutely intoxicating to me at the moment and I crave it the same way Elizabeth Siddal craved laudanum; in the blue waters of John Singer Sargent’s watercolours of Venice, in Klimt’s blue dress of Emilie Floge, in mosaics of Galla Placidia, in blue vases of Odilon Redon, in the blueness of Persian ceramics and interiors, blue of Edmund Dulac’s nocturnal Oriental fairy tale scenes, in Claude Monet’s blue waters beneath water lilies, and now, as I am gazing at this portrait by Kees van Dongen, I feel the blueness and the mystery seeping out of the painting and colouring my soul. I can feel the water, its depth and mystery, its scent, its constant movement, its secrecy. Everything in the painting is bathed in blueness; the background, the waters, the gondola and the gondolier, and even Luisa is dressed in a dress of midnight blue. There is so much intense blueness that it feels not as merely a nocturnal scene, but as a fantasy scene. Luisa is sailing the waters and threading the paths of her dreams.