An Interior in Venice reflects America’s continuing infatuation with the picturesque and evocative city. Sargent (American, 1856–1925) invites the viewer to observe members of a prominent Boston expatriate family in the elegantly decorated salon of the Palazzo Barbaro, where they had lived since 1881. Sunlight from the unseen windows overlooking the Grand Canal flickers over the furnishings and the four figures: the American painter Ralph Wormeley Curtis, his wife, and his parents. While the younger couple seems to exchange pleasantries over tea, the senior members of the family are detached both from them and from each other - he leafs through a portfolio and she notices only Sargent. The casual composition and vivacious brushwork prompted James McNeill Whistler to dismiss "the little picture" as "smudge everywhere." The writer Henry James stayed at the Palazzo Barbaro in 1899 and re-created it as the Palazzo Leporelli in his novel The Wings of the Dove (1902), telling candidly, as does Sargent, a tale of the most refined end of Venice's social spectrum.
[Oil on canvas, 66 x 83.5 cm]
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