On his several visits to Venice between 1895 and 1901, Sickert returned again and again to draw and paint this famous bridge. Conceived by Antonio da Ponte and constructed between 1588 and 1591 to replace a wooden bridge, the present single-span stone bridge, lined with shops along each side, has confounded contemporary critics of its bold design by surviving to this day. With one exception, Sickert chose to paint the bridge from the north, where the Grand Canal curves to the left to make its way towards the Lagoon.

For an artist so defiant of convention, Sickert was remarkably unadventurous in selecting places to paint during his 60-year career. So far as we know, he did not venture to southern France or to Rome or to Florence. Instead he immersed himself in a few chosen places: London, south-east and south-west England; Dieppe and Paris; and Venice. Within those places he often concentrated on a few chosen subjects. In Venice, he painted the grand sites as well as little-known backwaters, but whereas he painted sites off the tourist map such as Ponte delle Guglie sul Cannaregio or Fondamenta de Malconton once, he painted version after version of the Façade of St Mark’s, Santa Maria della Salute, the Scuola di San Marco, the Piazza di San Marco and the Rialto Bridge. In this he echoed the architectural series paintings of the Impressionists, for example Monet’s close studies of Rouen Cathedral and Pissarro’s Paris townscapes. However, unlike the Impressionists he was not primarily interested in capturing transient light effects upon a single scene. Sickert painted in the studio, from drawings, rather than outdoors. Repetition did not bore him. In each work he altered the composition; in each he exploited variations of colour, tone and touch. His aim was to extract from nature the character of a scene. A motif was dropped from his vocabulary only when he had exhausted its potential in terms of style and technique.

Sickert visited Venice in 1895-96, in 1900 and 1901, and in 1903-04. On the last visit he devoted most of his time to painting intimate interiors with figures. Nearly all his landscapes were painted on the earlier visits but it is not easy to establish with any certainty which paintings were done on which particular visit. On the whole a horizontal, landscape format is more characteristic of his first visit to Venice. For example, paintings of the full width of the façade of St Mark’s probably belong to 1895-96, whereas the half façades in upright format belong to 1900 and 1901. This rough demarcation seems to apply equally to Sickert’s paintings of the Rialto Bridge. A drawing published in The Savoy in April 1896 proves that the composition of three paintings which show the campanile of San Bartolomio peeping over the buildings flanking the canal on the left, the bridge itself in the centre left, and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi on the right, seen across a foreground stretch of water, was established on Sickert’s 1895-6 visit to Venice. In the most finished painting of this type, the light is limpid, the colours soft and the touch feathery: a fairy tale interpretation.

I believe that the present painting of the Rialto Bridge is a work of 1900. The format is now upright so that only the corner of the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi is incorporated; the deep stretch of water in the foreground fills nearly half the picture space. Dusk approaches, the sun is setting. The powerful design, the drama of the shifting patterns of light and shade, the deep saturated colours with blue grey and a rich yellow ochre predominant, the heavier broken touch, all suggest a date of 1900 rather than 1901. In 1901 Sickert made an effort to please his dealer in Paris, Durand-Ruel, by making his paintings lighter and brighter. Durand-Ruel had evidently complained that the paintings Sickert had sent to Paris in 1900 had been too dark and sombre to be readily marketable. But fashion is never static. Just as a more saccharine vision of Venice appealed to taste at the end of the nineteenth century, so modern taste is better attuned to the strength and drama of paintings such as this version of The Rialto Bridge.

Dr Wendy Baron