Venice: Through a Glass, and Darkly
Fig. 1. Fiesta Grand Canal, Venice by Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1858–1924), c. 1899. Glass and ceramic mosaic tiles in plaster, 11 by 23 inches. Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, bequest of Mrs. Charles Prendergast. For centuries now Venice’s amphibious condition, the uncanny way in which it rises, spectral and pale, out of the alien element of water, has captured the imagination of the world. A new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, Sargent, Whistler and Venetian Glass: American Artists and the Magic of Murano, does justice to that condition, even if it sometimes feels like two shows rather than one. The first is devoted to the American painters who flocked to the city in the final decades of the nineteenth century, together with the writers Henry James and Edith Wharton and the patrons Isabella Stewart Gardner and Leland Stanford. The second examines the virtuosic glasswork produced on the island of Murano. These two subjects converge, it is true, in the condition of Venice itself, in that intuition of decay that attracted John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler to Venice, and in the fact that a revitalized glass industry would help to lift the city out of its fallen state. Fig. 2. Fenicio goblet with swans and initial “S” stem, manufactured by Società Anonima per azioni Salviati e Compania, c. 1870. Glass; height 12 5/8, diameter 5 1/8 inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, gift of John Gellatly. When Whistler and Sargent arrived in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, they encountered a very different place from either that “white swan of cities” that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had seen more than half a century earlier, or that “pink and pearl” city (in Oscar Wilde’s phrase) whose wraithlike enchantments inspired some of J.