베네치아의 실내

In the early 1880s Venice was already a tourist city, sold in postcards of the Grand Canal and the Basilica. Sargent, in his mid-twenties and not yet famous, turned his back on all of it. He rented rooms in a run-down palazzo and painted the people who actually lived there. Here a few women pause in a long, cool, half-lit hall. Some of them are stringing the small glass beads that Venice made by the ton for export, work you could do sitting down while you talked. The light you notice is not on them at all. It comes from the tall windows at the far end, leaving the near figures in shadow and pulling your eye down the room toward the brightness.