Transmitted Light

The legendary glass art of Venice made a deep impression on American painters and collectors during the Belle Epoque.

By Rebecca Allan

Reflected, refracted, and poured, light is at the core of our capacity to perceive color, form, and space. These evanescent elements, present in glass objects, beckoned American artists and other visitors to Venice from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries. Today, “Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass: American Artists at the Magic of Murano,” on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in Washington, D.C., explores the rich legacy of Venetian glass as a source of intrigue and inspiration for two of America’s most distinguished artists of this period, along with their followers and patrons. Organized by Crawford Alexander Mann III, Curator of Prints and Drawings at SAAM, the exhibition presents new insights and unites artworks that reveal the historical significance and cultural impact of Venetian glass in the context of its revival during the Gilded Age.

Thomas Moran, A View of Venice, 1891, oil on canvas, 35 1⁄8 x 25 1⁄4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service, 1968.120.1

Focusing on the years between 1865 and 1915, the exhibition features more than 140 objects that exemplify a transformation in the position of Venice as a pinnacle of glass innovation, accompanied by an increased desirability among American travelers who came to appreciate and acquire glass as a highly valued art form. Through the curatorial juxtaposition of glass art with paintings, mosaics, and works on paper by American artists (both familiar and newly elevated), we have the opportunity to consider a more comprehensive story of glass, reflected not only through objects made of the material, but in images of its makers—the glassblowers, bead stringers, designers and other artisans depicted in their work environments.

During the industrial age of the late 19th century, Americans with the means to pursue the Grand Tour continued the longstanding tradition of European sojourns to study the cultural treasures of classical antiquity and the Renaissance. Drawn to Italy, they absorbed firsthand centuries-old art, architecture, and archaeological sites. Artists and patrons flocked to the glass workshops on the island of Murano, where they watched glassblowers at work and purchased fine vessels and mosaics to adorn their parlors or give to museums and other public institutions. Although Mark Twain’s  popular novel Innocents Abroad (1869) satirized the pretensions of certain travelers, the Venetian journeys deepened the practices of artists like John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler (and their circle), ultimately enriching cross-cultural exchange between Italy and the United States.

From their earliest history, Venice and its lagoon islands were settled by peoples fleeing political conflict, many of whom were former citizens of the Roman Empire.  From the first century A.D., glassmaking technologies were brought to Venice by these skilled immigrants, especially from Constantinople. In succeeding centuries, the Republic of Venice emerged as an international center for the production of glass and glass objects. Trade agreements that prohibited the importation of foreign glass and prevented foreign glassworkers from working within the city fostered artistic innovation and economic independence. In 1291, all of the city’s glass furnaces were moved to the island of Murano, where trade secrets could be protected while scientific innovation expanded through the exchange of skills specific to the production of different types of glass, from trade beads to one-of-a-kind luxury vessels. In the mid-15th century, cristallo veneziano, the first truly transparent glass, was discovered by Muranese glass master Angelo Barovier.

Attributed to Vittorio Zanetti, Fish and Eel Vase, circa 1890, blown and applied hot-worked glass, 12 x 4 1⁄4 x 5 1⁄4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly, 1929.8.469.2

Beginning in 1797, Venice suffered severe economic and cultural retrenchment when it fell to Napoleon and then to the Habsburg monarchy. During this period of decline, almost half of the Murano glass workshops closed, leaving only those that produced purely commercial items such as bottles and trade beads. However, in 1859–61, a new era in Murano glassmaking opened, catalyzed by a new workshop to produce mosaic tiles founded by Antonio Salviati and the opening of the Museo Civico Vetrario on Murano.

In literature, George Sand’s The Master Mosaic Workers and John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice sparked the imagination of potential travelers. These commentaries also inspired civic projects to restore church mosaics in St. Mark’s Basilica, among others. Concurrently, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) and James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), each found in Venice profound artistic nourishment in new subject matter and the opportunity to observe and document the creations and milieu of its glassmakers.

Sargent, born in Florence, was one of the most sought-after portrait painters of European and American high society at the turn of the 20th century.  Fluent in Italian, he had studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence and visited Venice often between 1898 and 1913, a frequent guest of Daniel Sargent Curtis (a cousin) and his wife Ariana. Whistler, born in Lowell, Mass., spent his childhood in Russia, studied in Paris, and settled permanently in London. In 1879, during a period of financial crisis and self-doubt, he arrived in Venice to fulfill a three-month commission for a series of etchings. Staying for 14 months, he experienced one of the most productive periods of his career, completing over 100 pastels and many etchings and watercolors. Whistler’s forceful personality and enormous output inspired other American artists there, in particular Robert Blum and Frank Duveneck, who carried his influence back to the United States.

Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Fiesta Grand Canal, Venice, circa 1899, glass and ceramic mosaic tiles in plaster, 11 x 23 in.
Williams College Museum of Art, Bequest of Mrs. Charles Prendergast, 95.4.79

Sargent’s monumental portrait A Venetian Woman (1882) was inspired by one of the many forms of labor that were part of Venice’s burgeoning glass industry. The model poses as a cernitrice, a female worker who sorted glass canes by color. The thin rods were cut into trade beads, exported, and traded by the millions in Asia and Africa as well as in Native American communities in North America. The portrait, intended for exhibition at the annual Paris Salon, was not finished on time, and it remained in Venice with the Curtis family.

Whistler’s mysterious 1879–80 etching The Doorway (First Venice Set) is among those commissioned by the Fine Art Society, London. This image represents the Palazzo Gussoni Grimani on the Rio de la Fava near San Marco. Two figures, one wringing out a textile, peer from an archway. Whistler’s virtuosity in the medium of etching is demonstrated in the delicate hatched linework that accumulates to form floral architectural decoration, the glasslike surface of the water, and even the pali di casada (striped poles). Other than some scattered depictions of bead workers, the prints that Whistler produced in Venice do not directly represent its glass culture, but rather serve as occasions for deployment of the artist’s innovative techniques of mark-making and composition.

Scrims of rain in Bertha Jaques’ April Shower, Venice (1914) and pools of light that fill the sails in Thomas Moran’s A View of Venice (1891) capture the maritime atmosphere and climatic variations unique to the city. In 1890, Moran actually purchased an antique gondola that was shipped back to his pondside house in East Hampton, N.Y. Jaques, a prominent Chicago-based printmaker specializing in botanical etchings, was a follower of Whistler, whose etchings she first encountered at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

The swirling forms of blown and applied hot-worked glass, exemplified by the circa-1880s Conical Goblet with Entwined Serpents Stem (attributed to Giuseppe Barovier or Benvenuto Barovia) is reflected in the painting May Flowers (1911) by Louise Cox (1865–1945). A young girl swathed in layers of turquoise-and-white silk and organza looks toward a handblown vase in the form of a coiled sea monster, surmounted by a similarly colored bowl filled with pink blossoms. Her ringlets and ribbons echo the stem of the glass as much as the colors. Cox, Sargent, and other painters must have enjoyed the challenge of translating the spectral colors transmitted through glass (the result of chemical transformation of metal oxides) into their mixtures of colored pigments suspended in oil and applied to canvas. Collectors, in turn, could identify such hues and patterns of glass, reinforcing the multiple levels of sophisticated craftsmanship and connoisseurship in these coupled works of art.

Enrico Podio, Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, 1866, glass mosaic tiles, 22 3⁄4 x 20 1⁄4 in.
U.S. Senate Collection

Artist and entrepreneur Antonio Salviati (1816–90) is credited with the resurgence of Venetian glass that encompassed developments in mosaic technology, the invention of metallic smalti (mosaic tesserae), and the creation of a library of thousands of colors of glass tiles. New mosaics and inlaid furnishings were made and seen by Americans at world’s fairs including the 1902 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. During an 18-month Venetian visit, Maurice Prendergast (1858–1924) created a small mosaic, Fiesta Grand Canal, Venice (1899) based upon his watercolor painting of a gondola fleet. Reimagined in tiny chips of glass, the nighttime scene is charged with sparkling energy through irregular surface reflections and graduated tesserae that convey depth. A mystery remains about this rare, experimental work. Did Prendergast collaborate with Italian assistants who may have arranged the tiles from Salviati’s color library, or did the painter acquire discarded scraps from a mosaic workshop and work on his own? Roman mosaicist Enrico Podio also utilized Salviati’s newly developed range of tesserae to mimic the color, shadow, and volumes of the presidential visage in his striking 1866 Portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

From top: Bertha Evelyn Jaques, April Shower, Venice, 1914, etching on paper, image: 5 1⁄4 x 7 7⁄8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chicago Society of Etchers, 1935.13.490

The danger and drama of the glassmaker’s art captivated American audiences who toured the furnaces and witnessed the virtuosic gestures of master artists blowing gossamer bowls and twisting ribbony, hot-worked handles and stems. By contrast, Sargent was interested in revealing the unromantic labor of the anonymous glass-bead workers, toiling in crowded rooms with negligible light. His Venetian Glassworkers (circa 1880–82) reveals the artist’s capacity to express empathy for the undercompensated labor (here, sorting glass canes before they are cut into beads for jewelry) that is hidden behind great artistic achievement and success.

Were it not for the vision and generosity of American collectors and patrons, including Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford (1828–1905), John Gellatly (1853–1931), and Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), those who could not visit Italy might never have had the opportunity to experience the magnificent cultural treasures of Venice. Gardner, for example, made multiple trips to Venice between 1884 and 1897 to visit studios and acquire art. When the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum opened in 1903, her many acquisitions of Venetian glass were displayed alongside other works of art, with the stipulation that the collection remain a permanent educational touchstone, never be rearranged or changed.

The impressively illustrated, scholarly exhibition catalogue for “Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass” extends the show’s didactic purpose with essays on related themes including Venetian mosaics and glass in the United States and intriguingly, the significance of antique and revival lace in Italy and the United States. Questioning distinctions between the so-called fine and decorative arts, the exhibition is a tour de force of aesthetic correlation and re-evaluation of glassmaking through the fusion of artistry, technology, and cross-cultural exchange.