The process of stringing beads involved gathering them onto wires from a small wooden trough placed on the knees. This cannot precisely be seen here, however. One girl reaches into a pouch, and a second has her hand raised. They face the open door of a shop and what would have been a third figure, now lost by the insertion of a piece of roughly painted canvas. Sargent was seemingly dissatisfied with this part and cut it out. The painting is inscribed as a gift to the Honourable Valentine Lawless, who later became Baron Cloncurry. An intermittent sculptor and collector, he requested the canvas from Sargent and had it repaired.
March 2016
Venice Re-discovered, Wildenstein, London, 1972
Venezia nel'Ottocento e mita, 1983-1984
Venice: The American View 1860-1920, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, 1985
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo, 26 January - 23 February 1989; The Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art, Yamaguchi, 2 March - 2 April 1989; The Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Kumamoto, 8 April - 7 May 1989; The Museum of Modern Art, Shiga, 13 May - 11 June 1989
Impressions of Venice, Museum of the North, Llanberis, 25 July - 20 September 1992; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 3 October - 15 November 1992
Venice: From a State to a Myth, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, 30 August - 30 November 1997
Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, 21 April - 15 August 2004
Shades of Grey: Painting without Colour, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 22 June - 29 September 2013