ISSN: 2471-6839
Cite this article: Emily C. Burns, review of Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass: American Artists and the
Magic of Murano, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Panorama: Journal of the Association of
Historians of American Art 8, no. 2 (Fall 2022), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.15405.
Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass: American Artists
and the Magic of Murano
Curated by: Crawford Alexander Mann III
Exhibition schedule: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, October 8,
2021–May 8, 2022; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, June 25–
September 11, 2022; Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, CT, October 15, 2022–February 27,
2023
Exhibition catalogue: Crawford Alexander Mann III, ed., Sargent, Whistler & Venetian
Glass: American Artists and the Magic of Murano, exh. cat. Washington, DC: Smithsonian
American Art Museum, in association with Princeton University Press, 2021. 336 pp.; 182
color illus.; 35 b/w illus. Cloth: $65.00 (ISBN: 978–0691222677).
Reviewed by: Emily C. Burns
How do you see a painting through a veil of glass
(fig. 1)? In the multimedia exhibition Sargent,
Whistler & Venetian Glass: American Artists and
the Magic of Murano—organized by Crawford
Alexander Mann III, former Curator of Prints and
Drawings at the Smithsonian American Art
Museum, and adapted for the Amon Carter
Museum of American Art by Margaret (Maggie)
Adler, where I visited the show—museumgoers
were asked to consider fantasies of place and
culture through painted representations of Venice
alongside examples of Venetian glass that
percolated through US art collections in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
exhibition attests to the depth of research about
the glass revival movement in Venice in the period
after Italian unification, the prolific acquisition of
such objects by US collectors, and the circulation
of white US artists in Veneto. The material offers an
opportunity to consider the role of tourism in
shaping art and tastemaking, to probe the meaning
of handicraft in a period of industrialization, and to
encourage a deep dive into materiality. The
journalpanorama.org
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Fig. 1. View of glass and paintings in the fifth
gallery of Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass:
American Artists and the Magic of Murano.
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, June 25–
September 11, 2022. Photograph by author
journalpanorama@gmail.com
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ahaaonline.org
Burns, review of Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass
Page 2
exhibition’s attention to privileged US mobilities giving access to Venice and enabling
interest in Venetian glass is a throughline, while the implications of labor and class, as well
as the possibility of material aesthetic dialogue between glass making and painting, remain
opaque.
Installed in Fort Worth against walls of vibrant, saturated colors like mustard yellow, deep
gray, azure, and sapphire blue, the paintings and glasswork alike seemed to glow in the six
galleries of the exhibition. Examples of ancient Venetian glass encouraged attention to
how fin de siècle Venetian glassmakers self-consciously reinvigorated earlier traditions
and continued to adapt artistic practice. Doubling down on the tourist experience, the
exhibition opened with a video of St. Mark’s Square in Venice as an iconic space (fig. 2).
John Singer Sargent’s A Venetian Woman (1882; Cincinnati Art Museum), cradling glass
canes in her arms, beckoned entry into the first gallery, which held both paintings and
glass.
Figs. 2, 3. Left: View of entrance to Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass: American Artists and the Magic of
Murano. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, June 25–September 11, 2022. Photograph by author. Right:
Second gallery in Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass: American Artists and the Magic of Murano. Amon Carter
Museum of American Art, June 25–September 11, 2022. Photograph by the author.
The second, larger gallery, with its lighter blue walls, configured Venice as a space that
drew heightened interest from US artists, and it presented a selection of tourist and
expatriate landscapes and genre scenes of Venice by Julius LeBlanc Stewart, Hermann
Dudley Murphy, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Frank Duveneck, and others (fig. 3).
Vitrines in the center of the gallery offered an exemplary array of both ancient and modern
blown art glass, including works by Vincenzo Moretti and other Venetian workshops.
The third gallery, featuring a mustard-colored backdrop (fig. 4), held a stunning collection
of bead trading cards from the Illinois State Museum, prints of the Venetian landscape and
its people, a freestanding video monitor with historical films about glass production, and
cases with samples of Venetian lace with intermedia links made to glass designs. A deepblue accent wall bore canonical examples of US artists’ paintings produced in Venice, such
as Sargent’s Leaving Church, Campo San Canciano, Venice (c. 1882; Collection of Marie
and Hugh Halff) and Venetian Glass Workers (c. 1880–82; Art Institute of Chicago).
Panorama • Association of Historians of American Art • Vol. 8, No. 2 • Fall 2022
Burns, review of Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass
Page 3
The fourth gallery focused on mosaic production and the concurrent renovation of Saint
Mark’s Basilica in Venice, as well as examples of ancient glass. The back wall featured a
fantastic, locally produced, step-by-step didactic display titled “How is Glass Made?,”
developed by the SiNaCa Studios School of Glass and Gallery in Fort Worth. It charted
glass production with samples of clear glass to materialize each step.
The fifth gallery traced the influence of interest in Venetian glass in the United States,
including examples of the Stanford University mosaics produced by Salviati & Co., a
luminous Maxfield Parrish painting intended for illustration, and appropriations of gondola
imagery by Winslow Homer and Arthur Beecher Carles. With midnight-blue walls, the
final gallery vestibule exhibited additional Stanford mosaics and paintings by Samuel Caryl
Coleman and Henry Alexander that render Venetian glass objects and tourist sites.
The signage of the exhibition presented the visitor with some challenges. Located in the
traveling venue of the Amon Carter, the exhibition seemed awkwardly scaled for the
space because many of the sections seemed to wrap between rooms. The placement of
the section labels confused how the show was parsed. For example, the wall label that
discussed the lace revival, visible at the far left of the dark blue wall, was tucked in the far
corner of a gallery where it did not clearly refer to the objects around it (fig. 4). Instead,
most of the paintings on the blue wall to its right were Sargent’s representations of glass
production and Venetian street views; the objects on the wall to the panel’s left included
Duveneck’s portrait Gypsy Boy (1885; Collection of Jane Joel Knox, promised gift to the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts). In the next gallery, the viewer may have wondered: How
does Pinckney Marcius-Simons’s painting of Antonio Canova producing a butter sculpture
(1885; Chrysler Museum of Art) relate to lace or mosaic production? Other display choices
also gave a muddled sense of order. The Stanford mosaics were divided across the last
full-sized gallery and the exit vestibule. Paintings produced outside of the United States,
such as by Robert Frederick Blum and Samuel Colman, were in a gallery titled “From
Murano to America” that announced its focus on the influence of Venetian glass back in
the United States.
Fig. 4. Third gallery in Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass: American
Artists and the Magic of Murano. Amon Carter Museum of American
Art, June 25–September 11, 2022. Photograph by the author.
Panorama • Association of Historians of American Art • Vol. 8, No. 2 • Fall 2022
Burns, review of Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass
Page 4
The inclusion of additional signage and greater integration across media may have helped
clarify the exhibition’s arguments and goals. In scale and luminosity, the oil paintings
tended to outshine the prints, which are more monochromatic and relatively diminutive in
scale. In a section titled “Intimate Views and Smaller Souvenirs,” prints by women artists
working in Venice, such as Ellen Day Hale, floated unmoored alongside small US-Japanese
color woodblock print collaborations between Andrew Kay Womrath and Yoshijiro
Urushibara, hung with wide spacing between the works. One glass case in the fourth
gallery of mainly ancient glass lacked numbers to identify the objects. These display
challenges reinscribed a hierarchy of media in a space that seemed otherwise to strive for
an immersive multimedia environment. Often, the art glass pieces were placed in cases at
the center of the room, which allowed them to be viewed in the round, but this decision
also reinforced a differential hierarchy between the paintings and the glass objects. I also
noted some visitors walking only the exterior perimeter, observing, it seemed, only the
paintings and prints. While the catalogue notes a desire to recover “intertwined stories”
connecting decorative and fine arts, the installation did not consistently support this
agenda.1
Also unclear was the relationship between the painters and their human subjects. The
exhibition shied away from considerations of the politics of labor and poverty in the face
of the privilege of elite tourism, as seen in Duveneck’s Gypsy Boy and Whistler’s The
Beggars (First Venice Set) (1879–80; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC). The
accompanying label for the Whistler print described “working class figures who loiter or
perform everyday tasks,” claiming they function by “adding local color” and framing the
scale of the represented space. What are the implications of this pronounced
aestheticization of labor in the context of what the label noted is a moment of Whistler’s
own privation, as he produced these objects hoping to market them to cover his debt?
What are the gender dynamics embedded in Whistler’s and Sargent’s renderings of
lower-class women? Such questions are likewise avoided in Stephanie Mayer Heydt’s
catalogue essay, which discusses these works.2 Labor percolates through paintings by
Blum and Sargent with their representations of individuals engaged in making lace,
beadwork, and glass. How does this focus inflect the makers’ self-perception as laborers
for a group of mostly privileged Northeastern and expatriate painters? Is there a dialogue
or a hierarchy between artist and artisan? How do the paintings operate both as symbols
of observer detachment and also as forms of immersion and escapism?
Further questions arise: What about Italian painters within this exchange? Was the US
colony in Venice self-segregated or segregated by language? What are the politics of US
interest in, and travel to, Venice and Italy around 1900? How did the vision of the place
and its art production square with the work of Italian contemporaries? What is the
relationship of the Veneto with the larger regional politics of the Risorgimento, a topic
addressed deep in the catalogue but not raised in detail by the exhibition’s interpretive
texts?3 Did the latter-day grand tour by US artists perceive Venice as cultural backwater or
as an icon of civilization? Other questions arise around the production of opalescent and
other forms of glass in the United States. Was there a dialogue involved with such
practices that could expand the narrative of exchange beyond US painting and Venetian
glass? Examples by artists such as John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany would have
been particularly insightful.
Panorama • Association of Historians of American Art • Vol. 8, No. 2 • Fall 2022
Burns, review of Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass
Page 5
The exhibition tiptoed toward but then sidestepped consideration of the possible dialogue
between Native American artists and Venetian glass through the enduring circulation of
glass beads across Turtle Island. The topic was noted briefly in the third gallery (fig. 4). The
catalogue, however, claims it is beyond the scope of the project, and the authors neglect
to point out rich scholarship on this topic.4 The inclusion of a few examples of historical
Native American regalia produced with Venetian beads might have contributed to a more
inclusive and expansive definition of American art, undergirding not only the role of Native
Americans in the history of American art but also drawing attention to the intersections
between glass and the politics of power. In the same period as Sargent’s, Blum’s, and
Duveneck’s luminous Venetian paintings, beading within the Dakota and Lakota nations in
the American Plains reached new levels of complexity as vests, dresses, and even
suitcases were entirely covered in beads. Native artists in the northern plains began to
introduce more figurative designs alongside long-standing geometric patterns in the face
of the most restrictive period of forced assimilation.5 An inclusion of Native American art
would have also provided a greater gender balance to the exhibition, since most Plains
beadworkers in the late nineteenth century were women. Further, integrating this material
would have afforded an opportunity to draw attention to the perceptual experience of
glass: in the same way that the uneven surfaces of mosaics catch the light as the viewer
moves, beadwork glints dynamically as its wearer takes steps.
The exhibition also elided what for me would have been the most powerful intervention of
this stunning multimedia display: a meditation on the aesthetic dialogues between painting
practice and resplendent glass. Indeed, many of the objects in the exhibition reveal that
this dialogue involves not only tastemaking but also materiality. The exhibition and its
catalogue leaned on glass as an iconographic symbol and object of collectors’ desire more
than an aesthetic model for luminosity, saturation, and glow in painting. But the paintings
of the “magic of Murano” seem to support this reading with their pops of color, even amid
somber palettes. For example, Heydt notes the “muted ochre, beige, brown and black” in
a painting like Sargent’s A Venetian Interior (c. 1880–82; Sterling and Francine Clark Art
Institute). However, in this representation of a cavernous and dark hallway, what stands
out is the vibrant light forcing its way through the back window and the swaths of red
along the figures at the right side of the composition, as well as the sea-green dress of the
figure in the left foreground.6 The staccato brushwork and coloration within the obscured
dark pictures operate, to my eye, subtly akin to mosaic. Likewise, the iridescent display of
color rendered by loose strokes in Blum’s Venetian Lacemakers (1887; Cincinnati Art
Museum) also evokes mosaic. In this vein, the aesthetic parallel drawn between Maurice
Prendergast’s mosaic Fiesta Grand Canal, Venice (c. 1899; Williams College Museum of
Art) and his painting Ponte della Paglia (c. 1898; Phillips Collection) might extend to other
artists’ experiments with oil painting in dialogue with the medium of mosaic as well. Can
we observe, in short, an aesthetic of glass being translated from one malleable and
viscous medium to another?
These visual qualities are—for the important glass collector, discussant, and critic of
American art, James Jackson Jarves—nothing short of transcendent. He enthuses, in
quotations leveraged more in the catalogue than the exhibition text, about glass’s ability
“to invent something so bizarre, ethereal, light, imaginative or so splendid, fascinating and
original in combinations of color and design, as to captivate both the senses and
understanding, and lead them rejoicing into faraway regions of the possibilities of an ideal
Panorama • Association of Historians of American Art • Vol. 8, No. 2 • Fall 2022
Burns, review of Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass
Page 6
existence.”7 Jarves extols Venetian glass’s role to “administer to the human craving for
beauty, perfection, the supreme aesthetic ideal of the moment, restless, ever-changing,
and never satisfied, because beauty is rooted in the infinite.”8 His language could easily
have been mapped into contemporaneous conversations about the visual experience and
goals of modernism. The curators might have pushed the parallels between motifs in glass
design and the development of abstraction, further driving home the centrality of the
Venetian glass revival to US art practice. The exhibition only passively suggested an
aesthetic correspondence between Venetian glass and the suggestive abstraction of
Carles’s Venetian Gondolas (c. 1909; Estate of Robert and Linda Wueste; see fig. 1), which
is so suggestively luminous that it invites the viewer to squint upon perceiving it, or the
textured, shimmering, and pearlescent rendering of Venetian ancient glass in Alexander’s
Cyprus Glass (1894; Collection of David Mamet and Rebecca Pidgeon).
The luscious materiality of the objects on display allowed viewers to fulfill a type of
armchair mobility, perhaps felt strongly after rampant physical stagnation during the
COVID-19 pandemic.9 The exhibition did deliver on this front. It provided access to an
aesthetic experience that one period critic called “fairy forms and rainbow hues,” even if
the politics and implications of this visual trade were not explicitly articulated.10
Emily C. Burns is Director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the
American West, School of Visual Art, University of Oklahoma
Notes
With thanks to Jessica Skwire Routhier, Annika Fisher, Mora Beauchamp-Byrd, and Caroline Riley for their
edits on this text and to my colleagues at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
1
Crawford Alexander Mann III, introduction to Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass: American Artists and the
Magic of Murano, ed. Crawford Alexander Mann III (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum,
in association with Princeton University Press, 2021), 32.
2
Stephanie Mayer Heydt, “‘Where Have Titian’s Beauties Gone?’ Sargent and Whistler on the Streets of
Venice,” in Mann, Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass, 150–51, 157–59, 165.
3
Crawford Alexander Mann III, “Sparks of Genius: American Art and the Appeal of Modern Venetian Glass,”
in Mann, Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass, 231.
4
Mann, introduction to Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass, 37, 57n17. Key sources include Marsha C. Bol,
The Art and Tradition of Beadwork (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2018); Lois S. Dubin, Floral Journey: Native
North American Beadwork (Los Angeles: Autry National Center of the American West, 2014).
5
See, for instance, Nellie Two Bears Gates (Gathering of Cloud Woman; Iháƞktȟuƞwaƞna Dakhóta)’s valise
(188–1910; Minneapolis Institute of Art), https://collections.artsmia.org/art/109856/suitcase-nellie-twobear-gates. On the flourishing of dense beading in the Reservation period, see Marsha Clift Bol, “Lakota
Beaded Costume of the Early Reservation Era,” in Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas: Selected
Readings, ed. Janet Catherine Berlo and Lee Anne Wilson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), 363–
70; Marsha Clift Bol, “Lakota Women's Artistic Strategies in Support of the Social System,” American
Indian Culture and Research Journal 9, no. 1 (1985): 33–51.
6
Heydt, “‘Where Have Titian’s Beauties Gone?,’” 154.
7
James Jackson Jarves, “Ancient and Modern Venetian Glass of Murano,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
64, no. 380 (January 1882): 186, quoted in Mann, introduction to Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass, 39.
Panorama • Association of Historians of American Art • Vol. 8, No. 2 • Fall 2022
Burns, review of Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass
Page 7
8
Jarves, “Ancient and Modern Venetian Glass of Murano,” 187, quoted in Melody Barnett Deusner, “Murano
Glass and its Collectors in Aesthetic America,” in Mann, Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass, 71.
9
Stephanie Stebich, “Director’s Foreword,” in Mann, Sargent, Whistler & Venetian Glass, 23.
10
“Blowing a Wine-Glass,” Manufacturer and Builder 1, no. 5 (June 1869): 169, quoted in Mann, “Sparks of
Genius,” 219.
Panorama • Association of Historians of American Art • Vol. 8, No. 2 • Fall 2022