The de Glehn and Monod Painting Circle in Italy
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Italy offered Wilfrid and Jane de Glehn, and in an earlier generation Lucien Monod, something more exacting than picturesque escape. It was a training ground in structure, atmosphere and the uses of history. For Wilfrid and Lucien, whose formative years in Paris had already taught them to think of painting as an art sustained by design, Italy extended that lesson outward into gardens, villas, sculpture and water. For Jane, Italy became part of the shared working life she entered through Wilfrid and John Singer Sargent: a world of loggias, courts, canal edges and terraced grounds where painting could arise naturally from company and place. In all three cases, Italy helped turn landscape into something more than a backdrop. It became a setting in which light, architecture and memory could be held in deliberate balance.
“Excuse this wobbly pencil… writing in a gondola.”
Venice was crucial to that education. When Wilfrid and Jane first visited in 1904, they arrived in a city of spectacle and, more importantly, an ensemble of private worlds consisting of the Palazzos on the Grand Canal, where Sargent’s socialite cousins, the heiress Lisa Colt Curtis and her first husband Arthur Rotch, lived in a highly cultivated, interior world which, whilst detached from the realities of life, provided a haven for painting. Jane’s letters from Venice, written from a gondola after sketching with Sargent, demonstrate how closely looking and living were joined there.
Lucien Monod (1867 - 1957) Scène de Canal, à Venise, oil on canvas, signed, 60 x 70 cm | £18,500
The city encouraged a way of seeing built on thresholds: the Grand Canal framed by balconies and landings, the Giudecca viewed across broad waters, the gondolas themselves acting as a floating studio, Sargent’s Venetian paintings made much of this condition. Rather than isolate a famous monument, that is Venice, he treated the entire island as a neighbourhood of walls, boats, light and life, something local and lived rather than theatrically iconic. Francesco Guardi (1712 - 1793) and Joseph Turner (1775–1851), amongst many others of the earliest, painted the landmarks which Sargent deliberately suppressed in favour of atmosphere and everyday character. That movement away from grand veduta and towards quotianism, is so close to the character that Wilfrid and Jane would carry into their own work.
If Venice taught them how a city could be experienced through water, light and movement, Frascati provided a sense of how a garden could become a entire world. In the summer of 1907, Wilfrid, Jane and Sargent painted in the grounds of several villas, including the 16th-century Villa Falconieri in Frascati, Italy. Wilfrid’s The Statue of Vertumnus, Frascati, Vertumnus, featuring the Roman god of seasons and change, is a significant work within this history. Taking the same subject that Sargent painted, now in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. This kinship matters as Vertumnus was an ideal subject for painters interested in the relation between permanence and passage. In both of their hands, the gardens of the statue are not simply archaeological, they are a pivot between sculpture, foliage, history, and sensation. Jane and Wilfrid's presence in these Frascati days matters too, as Sargent painted them both by the fountain at Villa Torlonia, making them not merely companions, but part of the very drama of the environment.
Nearby, Tivoli carried that same education into another register. Villa d’Este, with its terraced gardens and Renaissance fountains, had long served as a lesson in how architecture and gardens can compose an experience. A masterpiece of design (now a UNESCO Heritage site0), the famous Viale delle Cento Fontane (the Avenue of the Hundred Fountains) runs between the Oval Fountain and the Fontana di Rometta. With its walls animated by rows of spouts, masks and channels of moving water, the Cento Fontane is important provides rhythm, repetition, vertical interval and surface movement broken by water and framed by cypresses.
The avenue had already drawn artists long before Wilfrid’s generation. In the eighteenth century Fragonard made celebrated drawings at Tivoli, with later accounts of the Villa stressing that the “playful water jets” and the gardens’ change their beauty over time. Even when the de Glehns were not painting the Hundred Fountains directly, this idyll belonged to the same Italian inheritance and a world in which formal structure and sensory pleasure were inseparable.
Lucien’s relationship to Italy reaches further back. After Paris, he travelled to Florence to study the old masters, especially Giotto and the Sienese painters, and that gave his later work a refined sense of line and ordered design. Wilfrid’s response was different, but related. In Florence, in loggias and villa gardens, and later around Lake Garda in 1913, he learned how architecture and planting could steady the flux of light. Jane’s own Italian paintings and drawings demonstrate how she absorbed the same lessons with a more intimate emphasis: inhabited corners, shaded avenues, stillness held within enclosure. What Italy gave them, collectively, was not one style, but a discipline. Medieval and ancient survivals, sculpture in gardens, canal edges, fountains and walls all taught them how to make pictures that feel at once lived and composed. In that sense, Italy remained with them long after the journey itself, not as memory alone, but as method.
A fully illustrated catalogue for our exhibition, In the Wake of Sargent – The de Glehn and Monod Painting Circle is available to buy online and from our gallery in St. James's
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