Enfilade

In support of the Venice in Peril Fund:

Caroline Campbell | Reflections of Venice: How Water Inspired Her Artists
Royal Geographical Society, London, 14 May 2024

John Singer Sargent, Venetian Canal, watercolour and pencil, 25 × 36 cm (Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images).

Ruskin famously wrote of the stones of Venice, but what of its water? Venice would be nothing without water. The lagoon and canals were the core of her trading activity and wealth, from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century made manifest in the continuing annual tradition of the city’s marriage to the sea. From the late 19th century, the Lido also became an important element of Venice’s appeal and in particular as a tourist attraction. In this, the 17th Venice in Peril Kirker Spring Lecture, Caroline Campbell will explore the creative impulse of water—canal, river, lagoon, sea—in the work of Venetian artists and visitors to the city, from Carpaccio and Titian, Canaletto and Tiepolo, to John Singer Sargent, Thomas Mann, and John Lavery. Tickets for the lecture will be posted by the end of April; all tickets are non-refundable. A prosecco reception will begin at 6.30, with the lecture starting at 7.15. Standard tickets are £30; a recording, to be sent via email a week after the event, can be purchased for £10.

Caroline Campbell is Director of the National Gallery of Ireland. She was previously Director of Collections and Research at the National Gallery in London, a curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Curator of Paintings at the Courtauld Gallery, and the Jacob Rothschild Head of the Curatorial Department at the National Gallery, London. Dr. Campbell has curated several exhibitions devoted to Venetian art, including All Spirit and Fire: Tiepolo’s Oil Sketches (Courtauld Gallery, 2005); Bellini and the East (National Gallery and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, 2005–06); and Bellini and Mantegna (National Gallery and Gemaldegalerie, Berlin, 2018–19). Her love for Venetian art was honed as an MA student of Jennifer Fletcher’s at the Courtauld Institute of Art and through the experience of working as Assistant Curator of the National Gallery’s Titian exhibition in 2003. Campbell has written widely on Renaissance art—in exhibition catalogues, academic publications, and scholarly journals. Her first book, The Power of Art: A World History in Fifteen Cities, appeared in 2023. She is a Trustee of City and Guilds of London Art School, London, and of the Alfred Beit Foundation.