How Venetian glass influenced American artists and patrons during the late nineteenth century
Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass presents a broad exploration of American engagement with Venice's art world in the late nineteenth century. During this time, Americans in Venice not only encountered a floating city of palaces, museums, and churches, but also countless shop windows filled with dazzling specimens of brightly colored glass. Though the Venetian island of Murano had been a leading center of glass production since the Middle Ages, productivity bloomed between 1860 and 1915. This revival coincided with Venice's popularity as a destination on the Grand Tour, and resulted in depictions of Italian glassmakers and glass objects by leading American artists. In turn, their patrons visited glass furnaces and collected museum-quality, hand-blown goblets decorated with designs of flowers, dragons, and sea creatures, as well as mosaics, lace, and other examples of Venetian skill and creativity.
This lavishly illustrated book examines exquisitely crafted glass pieces alongside paintings, watercolors, and prints of the same era by American artists who found inspiration in Venice, including Thomas Moran, Maria Oakey Dewing, Robert Frederick Blum, Charles Caryl Coleman, Maurice Prendergast, and Maxfield Parrish, in addition to John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. Italian glass had a profound influence on American art, literature, and design theory, as well as the period's ideas about gender, labor, and class relations. For artists such as Sargent and Whistler, and their patrons, glass objects were aesthetic emblems of history, beauty, and craftsmanship.
From the furnaces of Murano to American parlors and museums, Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass brings to life the imaginative energy and unique creations that beckoned tourists and artists alike.
Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Exhibition Schedule
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
October 8, 2021-May 8, 2022
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
June 25-September 11, 2022
"Experience the spectacle of Venice and its rich history as a glassmaking capital through Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass: American Artists and the Magic of Murano. This exhibition catalogue is the first comprehensive examination of the American Grand Tour to Venice in the late nineteenth century, revealing the glass furnaces and their new creative boom as a vibrant facet of the city's allure. This gorgeously illustrated catalogue features paintings and prints by John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Frank Duveneck, Thomas Moran, William Merritt Chase, Maurice Prendergast, Maxfield Parrish, Louise Cox, and Ellen Day Hale alongside rarely seen Venetian glass mosaic portraits and glass cups, vases, and urns by the leading Murano glassmakers. Reuniting these exquisitely crafted objects with paintings, etchings, and drawings from the same milieu, this catalogue recovers and explains their past significance. Five new essays from experts in the history of American art and of Venetian glass provide the first combined survey of fine and decorative arts from the Venetian Grand Tour, offering a unique and valuable contribution to the fields of American Art and nineteenth-century cultural history. Ultimately, this project demonstrates the lasting impact of the nineteenth-century Venetian glass revival on American art, literature, and education, as well as period concepts of gender and social class."--
"The lush yet sensitive design of the more than 300-page volume echoes the sumptuousness of the art enshrined in it. Scholarly essays cover the marketing of artistic Venice, the process of regenerating Venetian crafts, and American participation in the story. Glass and lace terminology is clarified through glossaries containing such exquisite words as fragole, fenicio and reticella. Engaging biographies of key artists, critics and collectors appear as an appendix."
---Kate Eagen Johnson, Antiques & The Arts
