The Bridge by Night

The impressionistic atmospheric style of James McBey’s etchings, which so successfully captured locales in his native Scotland, are here applied to a Venetian canal. McBey looked to Whistler’s later Venetian etchings in his graphically furious, barely controlled, yet nonetheless effective evocation of the Bridge of Sighs, where the condemned of Venice crossed from the Ducal Palace to its dungeons. The bridge was famously invoked in the opening stanza of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV: "I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; / A palace and a prison on each hand…" McBey’s etched lines do not so much follow the contours of the Venetian bridge and buildings as conjure them forth, using a private vocabulary of very free strokes that seem to be drawn from writing.