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Barbara Weinberg: Hello. I’m Barbara Weinberg, curator—with my colleague Carrie Rebora Barratt—of the exhibition “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibition includes more than a hundred iconic paintings by many of America’s most acclaimed artists, who tell stories about their own times by depicting ordinary people engaged in life’s tasks and pleasures. The paintings range in date from the era of the Revolution to the eve of World War I. John Singer Sargent was the quintessential cosmopolitan American artist of the late nineteenth century. Although he was born in Florence, studied with a leading portraitist in Paris, traveled widely in Europe, and eventually made his headquarters in London, he always considered himself an American. Sargent had a continuing infatuation with the picturesque and evocative city of Venice. There, like many contemporary artists and other visitors, he was able to find isolation from modern developments, an unhurried pace, and invitations to pictorial story-telling. In An Interior in Venice, painted in 1899, we observe members of a prominent Boston expatriate family in the elegant salone of the Palazzo Barbaro, where they had lived since the mid-1880s. Sunlight from the unseen windows overlooking the Grand Canal flickers |
