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Dimensions: 55 by 46cm.; 21½ by 18in.
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Provenance: Bernheim Jeune, Paris
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Notes: Sickert made the first of many visits to Venice in 1895 and began a long association with the city. The exceptionally impressive architecture coupled with the distinctive effect of water had long provided artists with source material and this was no different for Sickert who was inspired by all the great monuments including San Marco, the Rialto and in the case of the present work, the Santa Maria della Salute at the opening of the Grand Canal. Indeed, the earliest known dated work from his first visit is a Whistlerian view of The Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute (1896, Private Collection, see Wendy Baron, Sickert Paintings and Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2006, no.111). In contrast to the elegance of the more obvious sites, Sickert was also fascinated by the juxtaposition of the grandiose facades with the quiet warren of passages and waterways that lay behind and which particularly appealed to his eye for the shabby ordinariness of everyday life that played its part in his later Camden Town series. The church of the Santa Maria della Salute was built in the 17υth Century in gratitude to the Virgin after the Plague of 1630. Sickert's first known works to include the Church focused on the building from a distance as part of a panoramic sweep of that part of the canal. The acute angle of the present work where the bold architecture becomes more apparent and the church literally surges out of the water, was first adopted circa 1901 (see Baron, ibid., no.168). It is interesting that Sickert's Venetian subjects were particularly popular in France and when the great Impressionist dealers Bernheim Jeune in Paris held an exhibition of his work in June 1904, 32 out of the 96 works were Venetian subjects. The present work may have been exhibited in the later Bernheim Jeune exhibition in 1907. We are grateful to Dr Wendy Baron for her kind assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.
