Venetian Glass Workers
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925)
1880–82
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 56.5 × 84.5 cm (22 1/4 × 33 1/4 in.)
- Culture
- Venice
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of the Americas
- Credit line
- Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Trained in Paris, John Singer Sargent traveled to Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy early in his career in order to study how painters such as Diego Velázquez and Frans Hals captured the effects of light and rendered figures in space. Venetian Glass Workers is one of several genre scenes featuring glass-bead workers that Sargent executed in the early 1880s. This backlit view of a shop in Venice is dark and atmospheric except for the brilliant strokes of light green and silvery white paint that describe the canes of glass as tradespeople prepare to cut them into bead-sized pieces, which will then be polished and strung into jewelry.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
