Im Wasser

By 1914 Eugene de Blaas had spent decades painting the same sunlit Venice: water carriers, laundresses, girls flirting on balconies, always fully dressed, always charming. This is the one time he did something else. A young woman stands barefoot in shallow water, leaning forward to watch a school of tiny fish, and it is the only nude he is known to have painted in a long career. The light is soft rather than sunny, filtered through a cloudy sky and thrown back off the water. He finished it the same year the old, easy Europe he had been selling to tourists and collectors began to come apart, though nothing of that intrudes here. The fish she is looking at are barely more than flecks of paint near her feet.