The Piazzetta and the Old Campanile, Venice

Walter Sickert made this transfer image using typewriter carbon paper and finished it with pastel. Whether he was investigating some form of producing multiples is unknown, but it is an intriguing possibility. However, no similar carbon drawing of The Piazzetta and the Old Campanile, Venice is known, or the original. Being able to manufacture several drawings simultaneously would save considerable time, and hand-finishing would make certain their status as original works. It was a way of working that artists had used in the past, albeit not with the new and modern material of carbon paper. In the eighteenth century, for instance, Thomas Rowlandson had combined printing with a form of graphite medium to imitate original drawing, and then hand-coloured the results. Also related, and undoubtedly known to Sickert, was Edgar Degas’s practice of making multiple traced images, applying pastel over the top and nuancing every image, so that each was wholly individual.1

Whether Sickert based the drawing on first-hand sketches is unknown. If it was, then these would have had to have been made from the vantage point of a boat. However, it is such a classic Venetian view that it is possible that Sickert simply drew it from postcards or guidebooks. Sickert certainly used such source material, and in a letter to Mrs Humphrey in 1899 he mentioned how, in London, he used ‘photographs of sitters and photographs of Venice’.2 The relatively large size of The Piazzetta and the Old Campanile, Venice raises the possibility that, in addition to being a carbon copy drawing, it was scaled up using a pantograph, a drawing instrument that can also be used to trace from photographs, for instance. The smudgy areas in the sky suggest that Sickert may have deliberately rubbed the carbon paper to create this effect, giving it texture and shading.

Traditionally, the drawing has been dated to c.1901, when Sickert was in Venice from January to July. However, there is no particular evidence for this. Sickert would return to a subject or motif at almost any time in his life. He made etchings of Venice in c.1902, such as Venice, The Façade of St Mark’s,3 which reproduces his painting St Mark’s, Venice (‘Pax Tibi Marce Evangelista Meus’) of 1896–7 (Tate N05914). But, as late as 1915, he made another group of etchings of the city, including Venice, The Lion of St Mark’s,4 which similarly utilised work he had made twenty years before. The bright colouring of Tate’s drawing would seem to count against such an early dating of 1901. Indeed, the dominant dazzling blue and the slightly fuzzy application seems to have more relation with works from the early 1920s, such as the oil painting Baccarat 1920 (private collection),5 or, equally, it might date from Sickert’s second campaign of Venetian printmaking in 1915.