His daily nap. Photo by Gribayedoff. Like their counterparts in the horse cab trade the gondoliers worked long hours and to catch their shuteye whenever they could. The American artist John Singer Sargent loved drifting through the Venetian canals in a gondola and painted several pictures from the "gondola perspective". One of them, Gondoliers' Siesta (1905) shows a pair of gondoliers napping in their boats. Source: Outing magazine, vol. LI no. 6, March, 1908, p. 653.