A Marengo

A Marengo was painted during the visit Walter Sickert made to Venice between the autumn of 1903 and the summer of 1904. He worked hard on this trip and it was an important time of development in which he evolved new ideas concerning pairs of figures in interiors.1 In Venice, Sickert led an extremely ordered existence, writing to his friend and patron Mrs Hulton on 1 January 1904 that he painted, ‘models from 9 to 11 and 1 to 4, and when the weather is fine a landscape or so’.2 He went on to explain that he got most of his sitters from the restaurant where he usually took his meals, the Giorgione di San Silvestro, run by Signor de Rossi.3

Wanting to be in the heart of bustling Venetian working class life, Sickert took rooms at 1057 Rio Terra di San Silvestro, near the Rialto,4 although he also kept up a studio at 940 Calle dei Frati. The winter of 1903–4 was one of the wettest Venice had experienced, and this led Sickert to abandon view painting and concentrate solely on figure compositions. He wanted to capture the vitality of working class characters in the city: a fisherman with a felt hat, a blind man, and the wrinkled features of the old woman ‘Mamma Mia Poveretta’ all intrigued him.

But more than any others, the models who absorbed Sickert the most were two young women who sat regularly for him: Carolina dell’Acqua and La Giuseppina. Both were prostitutes. Introduced to Sickert by her friend La Giuseppina, Carolina dell’Acqua was reputed to have got her nickname through a fear of water,5 while Sickert himself often referred to her simply as ‘La Carolina’. The dark-haired Giuseppina was one of Sickert’s favourites, and as the solo sitter in his picture Putana a Casa 1903–4 (private collection),6 his title, which translates as ‘Whore at Home’, confirmed her profession. Both women appeared singly in several of Sickert’s paintings, but it is the series of paintings of them paired together, as in A Marengo, that seized his interest.

Sickert wrote to his friend Jacques-Émile Blanche: