Venetian Glass, Lace, and Elegance — through an American Eye

Mystic Seaport mounts a gorgeous show on how Sargent and Whistler translated the fabled city’s aesthetic into American classics.

S argent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass opened a couple of weeks ago at Mystic Seaport, the maritime center in Mystic in southeastern Connecticut. I saw this lucid, elegant show last year at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and liked it so much that I went to see it again. It’s every bit as good, even better, since I hadn’t been to Mystic Seaport since I was a child, roughly when whalers still roamed the deep.

It’s an American art show with serpentine and filigreed twists fit for a Venetian goblet. It concerns the revival of the glass and lace industries in Venice starting in the 1860s and 1870s and the role of American collectors in promoting it. The glass and lace in the exhibition are exquisite. Most of it has been in American collections, privately owned or in museums, for well over a hundred years.

Venetian Glass then takes a clever, new look at American artists in Venice during the city’s tourist revival. The depictions of Venice by James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, as scholarly topics, have been plowed as often as the Grand Canal by gondolas at rush hour. Still, taking a connoisseur’s look at Whistler’s etchings, the curator teaches us new things about Whistler’s perfectly frugal lines. Many visitors won’t know Robert Blum, Henry Alexander, or Frank Duveneck, but their Venice paintings are well contextualized and nice to see.

The exhibition begins with a documentary, “you are there” description of Venice in the 1860s, and it’s hardly the Venice of maritime might, Titian’s beauties, the Grand Tour, or Canaletto pageants. Venice stumbled and fumbled in long decline starting in the late 1600s before falling flat at the feet of Napoleon’s army in 1797. “La Serenissima” (Most Serene) a thousand-year-old republic — actually, an autocracy — was first a bauble for Napoleon, then put aside like an old toy, then seized by Austria, and treated for decades like just another imperial department. Tourism sank.

Authorities in Vienna strangled its once-thriving glass industry to favor furnaces in Bohemia and Venice’s shipbuilding industry, too. The lace industry, which once supplied royals throughout Europe and the Near East, tanked as well, retreating to Burano, an island in the lagoon, to be practiced as folk art by old ladies. The economy went into a depression. In the 1860s, though, Venice joined a unified Italy. No longer little more than a colony, it began to modernize. The railroad had already arrived. The city improved is tourist amenities. Curious tourists, mostly British but some Americans, came. John Ruskin and Henry James made Venice a subject of contemporary literature, augmenting Shakespeare and the Romantic poets.

At the start of the show, a selection of American paintings — Thomas Moran’s view from 1891 is the best — helps situate us as imaginary tourists. I would have culled some of them. An annotated bird’s-eye view from an 1882 essay on Venice by Henry James and, better still, a view shot by NASA, give us a sense of place. That said, Hermann Murphy’s Murano, a nocturne view from 1907, is gorgeous, though the topography is so obscured by darkness and fog that we don’t see it as focusing us on Murano and the next section, which concerns glassmaking.

Ruskin, in his treatise Stones of Venice, from 1851–53, treated Venetian architecture but used words such as “fancifulness,” “love of variety,” and “love of richness” to describe a particular Venetian aesthetic that included old, Renaissance-era glass made when Venice was a living, active giant in culture. Venetian glassmaking, though, had disappeared by then. The city’s revival was ever so slightly stirring, stimulated in part by a long-postponed renovation of St. Mark’s Basilica, part of which targeted its crumbling, falling glass mosaics.

One of the heroes of the exhibition is Antonio Salviati (1816–90), a 35-year-old lawyer from Vicenza who moved to Venice to practice law. Smitten by the massive Gothic-era mosaic program at St. Mark’s, he did what lots of smart lawyers have done, among them myself, and should do today. He quit lawyering for culture, in his case opening a small factory producing the small glass mosaics that St. Mark’s needed.

The exhibition treats what became Salviati’s international mosaic business. This business, among other things, resurrected the glass industry. This was by no means easy since the industry’s infrastructure — its furnaces — were either gone altogether or antiquated, as were skills among workers. Salviati’s company built skills and technology from nothing.

Mosaic portraits of Lincoln and Garfield aren’t riveting, though, in comparison to the luxury art-glass revival business. Salviati’s success in mosaics and, soon, in Renaissance Revival vases led to other companies forming. Salviati’s ewer in the form of a boat is from the early 1870s but copies a glass form from the 1520s. The Compagnia di Venezia e Murano made tall, intricate vases, often with dolphins and flowers, that aren’t really revivals but new forms that make them prime Aesthetic Movement. A trumpet-like body is modern in evoking the breath of the maker. In some of the objects, filigree glass stripes were applied. This makes for a multicolor candy-cane look but also suggests painting with glass. These and other works are fragile — don’t bring them to your four-year-old’s birthday party — and whimsical.

An alphabet of forms, patterns, and colors made them appealing to collectors and, before long, icons of a new Venice, one of luxury and style. The selection is magical. Many American collectors started buying Venetian art glass. The companies in Venice were smart marketers who drew not only from high-end tourists such as Isabella Stewart Gardner but also from audiences at World’s Fairs, including the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Sheldon Barr’s impressive catalogue essay looks not only at the revival of glassmaking in Venice but at the American market. Mrs. Gardner so loved Venice that she bought a palace there and, before long, built her own Venetian-style palace in Boston, now the Gardner Museum.  Her Venetian glass collection is there, steps from Titian’s Rape of Europa.

The exhibition doesn’t make new points about Sargent in Venice but who cares? His Venice paintings in the exhibition are perfect eye candy. Sargent (1856–1925) considered himself an American even though he was born in Florence to expatriate parents and never actually visited the United States until he was 21.

He studied and worked in Paris as a very young man, became famous there as a portraitist, and visited Venice on a painting mission in 1880. His Venice work from this trip stars not Venice’s famous sites but its working-class women. Leaving Church, painted around 1882, shows a trio of women leaving a modest church in a modest neighborhood. These aren’t Titian’s beauties. Rather, the painting’s palette of terra-cotta, gray for pavement, and black for shawls is the antithesis to Venetian glass. It’s still a splendid painting for its paint alone. A splash of paint creates a swishing dress.

This, the Clark Museum’s Venetian Interior, and The Sulphur Match show Sargent moving from a philosophy of unmalleable finish, not tight but clear, to a dazzling freedom in applying paint. The Sulphur Match is a marquee picture depicting an Italian male type, half-dandy, half-loafer, all-flirt, with a woman leaning back against the wall in her chair so her shoes dangle in a way that Ruth’s Treatise on Decorum, published in 1879, wouldn’t condone. The Sulphur Match and Leaving Church are in a private collection and not often seen, so they’re worth the trip to Mystic.

Sargent made two dozen trips to Venice after this, concentrating on architecture and water and painting mostly in watercolor. Many of these works are lovely, but his scenes of everyday life are fantastic. He used models and staged the scenes to propose a secret, backstreet Venice that still provokes us to invent storylines that Ruth’s Treatise on Decorum would find very naughty indeed.

There are eleven Whistler etchings in the show, made in Venice between 1879 and 1883. They’re part of two “Venice Sets” and, again, have been deeply studied and exhibited hundreds of times. Whistler (1834–1903), probably even then the Western world’s most famous living artist, went before Sargent, who was well known in Paris but very young. Whistler’s Venice etchings were immediate successes and inspired Sargent to follow.

Stephanie Heydt’s essay defines them as mostly touristical, with more famous sites depicted, but not topographical. Whistler’s Venice was subtle and gestural. Venice is rich in embellishment, but Whistler mostly edited this out. Sargent sought backstreet Venice, a Venice that tourists didn’t know, through posed figures and narratives that might be cryptic but are still narratives. Whistler used tone and line to present the secret, though very real, Venice. Nocturne: Furnace is one of his great etchings and is well interpreted for Whistler’s supremely subtle adjustment of tone to get just the right touch of mystery. It’s a fire-and-water scene as well a dusk scene and, 140 years later, still enchanting. “Like breath on glass” is the way one contemporary critic described Whistler’s paint surfaces, but he might as well have used the term for Whistler’s tonal etchings.

I would have been tempted to confine Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass to, well, glass, insofar as decorative arts were concerned. Less is more is my default position. That said, the exhibition’s section on lace was entrancing and educational. It starts in the early 1870s, when two aristocratic Italian women, watching the revival of the glass industry, decided to do the same for lace. They found, alas, only one old lady, living in Burano, who knew the old techniques that had made Venetian lace as precious as gold jewelry. It took the establishment of a new school to train craftswomen, and the new generation was entirely female.

Blum’s Venetian Lacemakers, from 1887, is a fun, beautifully painted thing. It suggests the presence of an invisible, omniscient eye, making it cinematic. Young women lacemakers work, gossip, and laugh. They’re too beautifully dressed. One worker wears a low-cut ball gown with a corsage. Overall, it’s an expanse of Victorian schlock. Blum’s no Whistler, and he’s no Sargent. Still, it’s an attention-grabber.

Blum studied the technology, so the painting is a sparkling introduction to lace collecting and lace-making. Fanny Palliser’s 1865 book on the connoisseurship of antique lace established a knowledge baseline for American collectors to dive into the marketplace. Museums soon benefited. The Met got its first great gift of old lace in 1879. By 1921, it had two galleries dedicated to lace. The intricate linearity of lace soon made it to glass. Goblets and vases from the 1890s sometimes started with a net field on which artists applied delicate glass flowers, patterns, swans, or dolphins. Yes, lace is esoteric and demands close looking, but I’m happy the curators added it to the show.

I want to write about Alex Mann, the curator of the exhibition. He has worked on this project from his days as a curator at the Chrysler Museum, which has a lovely glass collection, and then at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, which itself has one of the country’s best collections of Venetian glass, given to it by John Gellaty, its earliest big donor.

Mann’s two essays in the catalogue are superb. The first is an overview and a great introduction. The second, at the end of the book, is a smart union of technology, art history, and an assessment of Venice’s place in contemporary art. He compares the filigree-based linearity of high-end Venetian glassmaking to Whistler’s line.

He also examines the adaptation of Venetian glassmaking to both electric light and Modernism. The addition of glittery gold dust created a sparkle suitable for electric light. Though the aesthetic of Venice worships moonlight, designers and makers moved with the times.

Mann also connects the revival of glass and lace, to new, high-end tourism and the birth of the Venice Biennale. In the 1880s and 1890s, glass and lace together made Venice a center of contemporary art. The founders of the Biennale saw this as yet another reason for locating a big modern art fair there.

I look at this exhibition as art history at its best. It’s history, connoisseurship, surprise, and objects of the highest quality. The Smithsonian American Art Museum organized it and produced one of the best catalogues I’ve read. This isn’t a shock since the museum has a tradition of beautifully designed, incisive, and cogent books.

I’d suggest that curators and directors everywhere get themselves to Mystic — it’s both nifty and erudite — or at least read the delicious catalogue. I hope they think about their own programming, too much of which is faddish and dull, preachy and naïve, dank and weepy. How about less blather about race, more scholarship on lace. More Murano glass, less moronic climate gas. Less Covid Forever — it’s so dumb. More Sargent, Whistler, Salviati, and Blum. Venetian Glass is so good, it moves me to poetry.

The exhibition is in Mystic Seaport’s new, or nearly new, space for high-end loan shows. It opened in 2016, and though I know Mystic took a very good Turner watercolor exhibition from the Tate, I saw a version of the show in London, not in Connecticut. I thought at the time that it was an ambitious and surely expensive exhibition for a place known more for shivering timbers than gouache and hue. They did it, though, and it was well received.

Centerbrook was the architectural firm. It’s in southeastern Connecticut, not far from Mystic, but has a national profile in education and culture. The museum building evokes what the architect calls “the geometry of the sea,” taking design cues from the interior of a ship, the undulating ocean, and the inside of a nautilus shell. It’s a serene, thoughtful space.

Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass is wonderful. Get to Mystic to see it, and flirt with seafaring, too. The new art building, called the Thompson Center, shows art with some connection to maritime experience. In Venetian Glass, Mystic Seaport has found an out-of-the-box, or out-of-the-furnace hit.