Walter Richard Sickert, R.A.

André Gide (1869-1951), acquired by 1903, and thence by descent to Catherine Gide

Their sale, Piguet Hôtel des Ventes Geneva, 22 September 2021, lot 134, where acquired by the present owner

Pierre Masson and Olivier Monoyez, André Gide et les peintres, Lettres inédites, Gallimard, 1919, illustrated p. 52

Robert Upstone, Sickert in Venice, Scala, London, 2009

Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, Paul Mellon Centre, Yale U.P., London, 2006

(Probably) Paris, Durand-Ruel Gallery, Exhibition de Société Nouvelle des Peintres et Sculpteurs, 1903, no. 134

Paris, Bernheim Jeune, Walter Sickert, 1904 (as Le Rialto)

Le Lavandou, Villa Théo, Collection Catherine Gide, 9 June - 26 September 2020, no. 63

The Rialto Bridge and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, c.1901, is a jewel of Walter Sickert’s Post-Impressionist engagement with urban life and architectural form, shown through a prism of Venetian light. Painted during a formative period of his career, it exemplifies Sickert’s evolution from French Impressionist influences to a bolder, more structural handling of paint that anticipates the psychological and formal concerns of early Modernism. Sickert’s impressionistic handling of the paint of the waterways, and masterful capturing of the light of the city, confirm this painting as a masterpiece from his art of this period.

Sickert first visited Venice in 1895 and called it ‘the loveliest city in the world’. Painted c. 1901, the work dates from Sickert’s extended stay in Venice between 1901 and 1904. Disenchanted with life in London, and with his marriage to Ellen Cobden deteriorating, Sickert found solace and stimulation in the floating city. Unlike his early mentor James Whistler, whose Venetian scenes often revelled in nocturnes and mist, Sickert was drawn to the city’s theatricality by daylight. His Venice is populated by its buildings rather than its people, its drama enacted by stone, shadow and sunlight.

In this painting, the viewer is facing South-West onto Venice’s Grand Canal, where it bends around the angled faced of the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi toward the famous Rialto Bridge - originally a wooden structure replaced by an impressive stone one in 1588. Sickert places us slightly off-centre, on the opposite bank of the canal, inviting the viewer to experience the scene as an observer within the city’s swiftly moving rhythm. He has captured the light of a late summer’s day, and the surface of the Serenissima’s water vibrates with reflected colours - purples, ochres, greens - dissolving the edges of the architecture above into light. The painting’s subtle tones and dark outlines also suggest the influence of Whistler’s etchings and Venetian Nocturnes.

The Rialto Bridge and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi belongs to a small group of Venetian works that Sickert executed in both oil and print. His mastery of etching is evident in a closely related drypoint titled The Rialto and the Palazzo Camerlenghi (c. 1901), held today in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A similar composition exists at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, revealing the artist’s habit of reworking successful motifs across media, constantly refining his compositions. This group of Venice paintings draw upon Impressionist spontaneity while moving decisively toward a tonal, planar solidity that would deeply influence the next generation of British painters.

His pictures from this period are considered amongst his most successful and sought-after, and were particularly popular with a French audience, sold through dealers Bernheim Jeune in Paris. The Rialto Bridge and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi appeared in Sickert’s solo exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim Jeune in Paris in 1904 and was acquired by the French writer André Gide shortly afterwards. That it should have appealed to a literary figure of Gide’s intellect and taste is telling: this work possesses an underlying narrative quality and a sense of scene. The work remained in Gide’s family until 2021, a testament to its enduring appeal.

The Rialto Bridge and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi is also significant in the broader context of Sickert’s development as a painter of urban realism. Just a few years later, he would return to London and embark on his celebrated Camden Town series, to which the same compositional perspicacity would be applied. Venice, then, served as both sanctuary and laboratory - a place where Sickert honed the visual language that would define his later output.