The great American painter captures in watercolour the light, work, and colours of a unique landscape at the dawn of the 20th century.

What did the Carrara marble quarries really look like more than a century ago? Not only in the geometry of the quarry faces or in the images of the men at work, but in their colours: the dazzling white of the marble under the sun, the blue of the shadows, the reddish earth deposits on the stone, the greys of the rain, and the colours of clothing and ropes.

Historical photographs have left us with extraordinary images of the quarries between the 19th and 20th centuries: mountain faces carved into the rock, blocks of marble, railway tracks, oxen, and men clinging to ropes. But the photographic documentation we have from those years is mainly in black and white.

To rediscover the colours of the quarries in 1911, we therefore need to look elsewhere: to the watercolours of John Singer Sargent. In his works, marble is not simply white. It is blue in the shade, grey beneath the rain, streaked with greens, ochres, and rusty earth tones. The ropes have their own colour, and the quarrymen’s clothes another. A red handkerchief can suddenly light up the vastness of the quarry. 

They are works of art, but more than a century later, we can also view them as something surprisingly close to colour snapshots of life in the Carrara quarries at the beginning of the 20th century.

This time, Carrara marble enters art before it even becomes art. It is not a statue, a building, or a design object. It is still the mountain: stone, dust, water, toil, and light.

An International Artist Inside the Mountain

Born in Florence in 1856 to American parents and educated in Florence and Paris, Sargent was one of the most renowned artists of his generation, celebrated for his magnificent portraits. Sargent knew how to make the quality of things visible. In his paintings, silk, velvet, lace, and leather seem to possess their own weight, temperature, and texture, while the subject is elevated, imbued with charm and a sense of social status. His portraits are celebrated worldwide; some caused scandal, while all won over both patrons and critics.  

By the end of the 19th century, he had become the painter of the international elite, sought after and admired. Around 1907, tired of the constraints of fashionable portraiture, he tried to give up official commissions and increasingly devoted his energy to travel, mural painting, landscapes, and watercolours. This turning point was rooted in his background and his itinerant life. Having grown up between European cities and Alpine retreats, Sargent had sketched outdoors since he was a boy. Close to the Impressionists, with whom he shared an interest in en plein air painting, the landscape gave him freedom of choice, different rhythms, and new subjects, while watercolour became the ideal medium for capturing whatever he encountered: landscapes, water, rocks, architecture, and people.

In 1911, that eye encountered one of the most extraordinary white landscapes in the world. On his journey through Italy, he arrived in Carrara, which he already knew for its artistic heritage and the striking Apuan Alps. The latter immediately capture his interest. 

Sargent did not stop at simply admiring the mountains from afar. He ventured up into the quarries and spent weeks sleeping in a quarrymen’s hut, so rudimentary that, according to a recollection of a friend reported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his companions could not endure its hardships for long. The choice reveals how closely he wanted to engage with his subject: observing the scale of the quarry faces, following the quarrymen’s movements, and watching the marble change colour in the sunlight, shade and rain. To be immersed in the landscape, surrounded by the white marble that, from a distance, many travellers mistake for snow.

The works preserve this sense of immersion. It is difficult to imagine a better evidence of the fascination this place held for him.

Sargent paints marble by letting the light in. Critics have repeatedly highlighted his ability to capture light on white surfaces. In his paintings, white is never an absence of colour, but a surface capable of absorbing and reflecting infinite variations of light. The technique combines graphite with transparent and opaque watercolours and, in several sheets, makes use of wax resist: wax is applied so that certain areas of the paper repel water and pigment. To capture the luminosity of the marble, Sargent does not add white in certain areas; instead, he allows the light of the paper to shine through. The material and the painting process thus seem to converge. The marble reflects the light in the quarry; the paper preserves it in the watercolour.

Carrara: Industrial Landscape and Spectacle of Nature

The Carrara that Sargent encountered was at a remarkable moment in its history, seemingly suspended between two eras.

Modernisation was already underway. The Ferrovia Marmifera ran through the quarry basins, connecting the quarries, storage yards, sawmills and the plain; the helical wire had introduced new possibilities for cutting the marble. And yet modern technologies and traditional practices continued to coexist. Lizzatura was still in use, oxen continued to play a role in moving the marble, and many operations on the blocks were still carried out by the hands of stone dressers, trimmers and lizzatori (specialized handlers). It is precisely this interplay between industry and traditional know-how that characterises the quarries in those years.

Although he found himself confronted with a changing reality, the machines are not the protagonists of his paintings. Sargent paints the men, the ropes, the weight of the marble, and the grandeur of the mountain.

The Men in the Quarry

In Carrara: Lizzatori I and Lizzatori II, ropes and bodies become part of the composition. The men are small compared with the mountain walls, but without them we would understand neither the scale nor the weight of the marble. The ropes cut diagonally across the scenes, taut with a strain that can almost be felt physically. Their postures convey coordination, expertise and danger.

In Workmen, by contrast, three men are seated on the quarry steps. It is a moment of rest. A red handkerchief, work boots, and the brilliant white dust covering their clothes are enough to suddenly bring everyday life into a monumental landscape. An incredibly powerful image in its stillness.

Sargent also produced numerous drawings of the workers, as well as studies of their poses. These observations would give rise to Bringing Down Marble from the Quarries to Carrara, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a large-scale composition in which the workers, positioned at the ends of the ropes, convey the stark disparity between the human body and the mass of the mountain. The men give the mountain its measure. The ropes make the weight visible. Research into the work reveals how Sargent brought together in this composition many studies made directly on site.

The Colours Photography Could Not Capture

Perhaps the greatest surprise comes when standing before Carrara: Wet Quarries.

Here, the very idea of “white marble” seems to dissolve. The wet quarry becomes blue, grey, green, ochre. Seepage and earth bring out rusty tones across the surface, while shadows transform the color of the stone.

Carrara appears as it truly is: a material capable of constantly responding to light and the environment.

This is one of the reasons why these watercolours are so precious to us today. From the late nineteenth century onward, photographs of the quarries had already begun to shape a powerful visual iconography of the Carrara landscape. Alinari had photographed Fantiscritti, Ravaccione, Tarnone, the railway stations, and the work of the quarrymen. But that universe reached the observer through black and white. Significantly, Sargent himself took a series of stereoscopic photographs during his stay in Carrara.

The watercolours add something those images could not convey in quite the same way: the quarry’s visual temperature.

When Travelers Came to the Quarries

That this landscape held an appeal extending far beyond the world of production is demonstrated by another story: that of the tourists who visited the quarries.

In 1899, for example, Gabriele D’Annunzio visited the marble quarries and, upon returning, wrote that he still had “his eyes filled with the great marble radiance”. He returned to Carrara several times in the following years, drawn back by the spell of the place.

And in 1916, a guide published by the Touring Club Italiano explained to travellers that those wishing to visit the Carrara marble quarries could contact the Ferrovia Marmifera (Marble Railway Company) directly: upon request, a 25-seat carriage for visitors would be added free of charge to the train carrying the marble. The image is striking: locomotives and wagons loaded with blocks climbing up the mountain and, in the same train, men and women who had come to see the quarries with their own eyes.

Sargent had made the journey a few years earlier, going a step further: he decided to stay long enough to paint them.

The attraction is unmistakable. Faced with the white walls of the Apuan Alps, the labour of the men, and the sheer scale of this industrial landscape, the quarry ceases to be merely the place from which marble comes. It becomes spectacle, experience, image. And it becomes a story.

A Marble Capital Already in the World’s Gaze

Today, Sargent’s Carrara watercolours are held in major international collections. It is a significant journey: from the quarry yards to the great museums.

The largest group is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acquired in 1912 (just a few months after Sargent’s stay in Carrara and following their first American exhibition); other studies and works are held at the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate, and the Harvard Art Museums. The oil painting Bringing Down Marble from the Quarries to Carrara, meanwhile, is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

More than a century later, we can look at these works not only as extraordinary watercolours by John Singer Sargent, but also as a testament to what the quarries represented: a landscape shaped by material and labour, where human strength is measured against the grandeur of nature. 

For those of us who work with quarries, this is their most contemporary strength. They are like “snapshots” that allow us, for a moment, to step into the quarries of 1911 and rediscover what time has transformed: the gestures of the lizzatori, the ropes, the men sitting on the blocks, the rain-soaked walls.

And above all, the colours. Because Carrara marble, even when it appears to be simply white, is never just white.