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Three wholly modern, entirely individual ways of looking at Venice – all made by foreign visitors – intersected exactly 114 years ago, in 1912.
That year, Claude Monet exhibited paintings of iconic Venetian buildings that he had begun during a two-month stay in autumn 1908. He resumed the unfinished canvases in May 1911, working now from memory, and showed them to acclaim in Paris a year later. His Venice is all shimmering light. Stoney surfaces dissolve into dashes of pure colour. In the foreground of some, pali da casada in the Grand Canal – the distinctive thin, striped poles for mooring gondolas – are more substantial than the vast, magnificent domed Santa Maria della Salute disappearing into the haze beyond. The city is a site of dissolution, time and elusive recollection triumphing over fading grandeur.
‘Mann’s famously melancholic novella and its later avatars in film, opera, music and drama, shape a perception still alive today of Venice as the site, par excellence, of yearning, existential loss.’
That same year in Germany, Thomas Mann published Death in Venice. Aschenbach pursues Tadzio on the Lido. The aging writer repeatedly compares the beauty of the Polish boy to ancient Greek sculptures and his youthful self-absorption to that of Narcissus. Cholera pursues Aschenbach in turn. The final glimpse is of the lad running by on the beach as the writer dies alone on the sand. Eros and Thanatos, unrequited longing, combine. The famously melancholic novella and its later avatars in film, opera, music and drama, shape a perception still alive today of Venice as the site, par excellence, of yearning, existential loss.
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Emil Sands, All Day Duchess, 2025 -
Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke visited Venice often. The city held him in its grip. But it was not the Venice others came to see. San Marco, the Doge’s Palace – crowded with tourists then as now – get only a look-in as Rilke makes his way to hidden corners. In March 1912, he writes to a friend: ‘Still here. I cannot get away. […] I visit neither churches nor museums. I spend whole afternoons out at the Lido; at the farthest end, near Fort San Niccolò. […] Whenever possible, I go right to the blue faraway end, entirely alone in the open radiance.’[1] Rilke’s Venice is the site of lyrical reflection best realised in tranquillity.
‘For a painter, writer and trained Classicist like Emil Sands, Venice cannot but leave a strong imprint – but more, perhaps, as aura than in representation.’
Dissolution. Loss. Inner searching. All in a minor chord, these are not inconsequential tropes. They add to the many that Venice has so lavishly strewn at visitors’ feet over the centuries. In light of this, how does a young artist who is able to weigh that tradition depict Venice today? For a painter, writer and trained Classicist like Emil Sands, Venice cannot but leave a strong imprint – but more, perhaps, as aura than in representation.
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Emil Sands, Alice, 2025
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Yet another foreign visitor, Sands spent a residency in Venice in mid-2025. There, he was free to explore its labyrinth of canals, alleys, bridges, churches, museums and gardens, before retreating to the studio to work. With the exhibition Watchmen he returns to show us, in situ, the paintings and oil sketches on paper he made there. He continues to address a favourite theme: bathers absorbed in nature. He finds, however, a deepening visual and psychological complexity in the haunting solitude of individual figures and the interaction between protagonists is often enigmatic. What are they saying, thinking or not choosing to say as they pass time together? Particularly in his startlingly improvisatory oils on paper, Sands expands his considerable technical virtuosity as well. Venice has long been the home of painterly painting and he rises to the challenge with bravura sheets of colour which succinctly evoke form, atmosphere and diminishing light, while some of the land- and skyscapes flirt with abstraction.
‘Like Rilke before him, Sands is drawn to hidden pockets of the city.’
Like Rilke before him, Sands is drawn to hidden pockets of the city. No palazzi are seen here. Rather, he finds his way to secret gardens tucked in behind them. In one painting, All Day Duchess, a girl in a bikini lies prone along the edge of a stone-lined pool in a manicured garden, presided over by a marble bust of Apollo, nose broken off. In another, Alice, a younger girl, also alone, dips a tentative toe into a second artificial pool while on the far side two grand, possibly Baroque, busts on pedestals are reflected in the shimmering water. In 1908, Rilke had found his way to one such private place as well on the Giudecca. ‘Suddenly you come upon them, these gardens brimming over their ancient walls. […] They have an indescribable secretiveness. […] The silence that pervades them must become stupefying.’[2] -
Emil Sands, Alan's Passion, 2025
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Sands also ventures out to the edges of the city. There, vaster, more unkempt gardens overlook the sea where storms come up quickly over the Adriatic. In The Vulture, a lone male figure in baggy trunks looks up into a tumultuous sky. That we see the cornice of a castello high on a hill at the right shows that we are still in the Veneto. That we see the youth di sotto in su (from below, upwards – a strategy beloved of Venetian painters) suggests a perilous insecurity has rooted him to the spot. Many more paintings show coupled figures communicating, or not, such as Ancient Boys, Watchmen, 11 and Watchmen, 19, while others show intricately interwoven trios, as in Sentinel. Then there are full-scale landscapes populated by people enjoying each other’s company; in one, Alan’s Passion, a young lad takes a snapshot of an older man on his cell phone. Sands’ cell phone pulls the viewer back into the unmistakable here-and-now.
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Emil Sands, The Vulture, 2025
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The rich interaction of ‘finished’ paintings with looser, smaller works on paper is particularly suggestive. One abbreviated sketch, Watchmen, 17, would appear to be a quick preparatory study for the evocative and more fully detailed Cracking Tree. Others showing youths in bathing suits interacting by the water adumbrate more elaborate paintings of youthful sociability by water. Others stand entirely on their own, like the rapidly executed sketch, Watchmen, 8, showing two folded beach umbrellas, side-by-side seemingly engaged in mournful conversation. Greatly daring in his depiction of how people (mostly near-naked) and things in nature interact, the mystery that is Venice here pushes Sands to new and greater subtleties and intricacies of observation.
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Emil Sands, Sentinel, 2025
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The title, Watchmen, is necessarily ambiguous; at once a job category, a suggestion of a command, what we do, what those in the pictures do. We watch. Even the ancient sculptures whose eternal stillness animates several pictures here, even the marble Venus seen from behind in Watchmen, 18: they watch too. One work on paper, Watchmen, 7, shows what appears may be a classical marble torso – headless, limbless – atop a pedestal. Rilke tells us that it too sees. As he says in his haunting Archaic Torso of Apollo of 1908, it sees with its very body, shattered and imperfect as it may be, ‘for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.’ [3]
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Christopher Riopelle
The Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, LondonAll works © Emil SandsText © Christopher Riopelle[1] The Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke and Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, translated and introduced by Nora Wydenbruck (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), p. 39, letter 80.[2] Letter of 24 March 1908 cited in B. Haustedt, Rilke’s Venice: The City in Eleven Walks (London: Haus, 2019), p. 103.[3] Online: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1679348/archaic-torso-of-apollo; translation by Stephen Mitchell 1995. -
Emil Sands: Watchmen
Sands in Venice
Christopher Riopelle considers Emil Sands, who created works for his exhibition Watchmen during a residency with the gallery in Venice, within a lineage of artists and writers who respond and give shape to the city.
