St Mark’s, Venice (Pax Tibi Marce Evangelista Meus)

The Latin part of this work’s title is the motto of the city state of Venice: ‘Peace be unto you, Mark my Evangelist.’ Mark is the city’s patron saint, and his emblem of a winged lion guarding his Gospel is represented in Venice’s coat of arms. The remains of St Mark were stolen by Venetian merchants from Alexandria in 828, but were lost in 976 after a fire destroyed the original basilica that had been built to house them. His body was miraculously rediscovered in 1094, the year the new Basilica of St Mark’s was consecrated.1

Sickert visited Venice for the first time in October 1894 with his wife Ellen, and they returned there the following autumn, staying in a flat overlooking the Zattere that belonged to a friend of her family. Sickert wrote to his friend Philip Wilson Steer:

On his visit to Venice in 1895–6 Sickert’s choice of picture subjects was quite conventional, being explorations of well-trodden tourist locations. Since its publication between 1851 and 1853, Ruskin’s Stones of Venice had become enormously popular and helped build a passion for all things Venetian in Britain over successive decades. A tangible record of this enthusiasm, which remains today, was the widespread imitation of Venetian Gothic architecture in London and other cities, evident in rows of terraced houses and corner pubs. By the time Sickert arrived in Venice, pictures of ‘la Serenissima’ were a popular and profitable component of the annual Royal Academy exhibition and the Paris Salon. Pictures of the city had, of course, been bought intermittently by British collectors since the time of Canaletto and Francesco Guardi, but a renewed enthusiasm peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. At this time large numbers of artists from many countries went to work in Venice to portray its picturesque canals and, most commonly, sentimental genre scenes of the inhabitants. The leading continental exponents of this type of picture were two Austrian painters, Cecil van Haanen (1844–1914) and Eugene von Blaas (1843–1932), whose style and choice of subject exerted a strong influence on the work of British painters such as Henry Woods (1846–1921). By 1886 the Art Journal was able to identify a ‘modern Venetian school’ whose foremost members were Woods, Luke Fildes (1844–1927) and William Logsdail (1859–1944), noting that: