Works by Canaletto
191 works · 153 ms
Canaletto, born Giovanni Antonio Canal, painted opera scenery with his father before turning to views of Venice, many of them sold to Englishmen on the Grand Tour.
Much of his early work was painted out of doors, when most painters finished pictures in the studio. In 1725 an agent told a collector his views were like Carlevaris's, only with the sun shining in them. The Stonemason's Yard, from about then, looks over a yard strewn with stone blocks to a church tower across the canal.
City views make up most of the works below, chiefly paintings, with etchings and drawings besides. He also painted capricci, or imaginary views, though in his work the line between real and invented is never sharp. In Capriccio View with Palladio's Design for the Rialto Bridge, a bridge carrying a temple front and a row of statues spans a Venetian canal. In an imaginary view of Venice, an etching of 1741, even the sky is drawn in long, level lines.
When war cut the flow of British visitors to Venice, he moved to London in 1746. Westminster Bridge, with the Lord Mayor's Procession on the Thames, painted in 1747, sets gilded barges below a bridge that was still being built, so he largely imagined it. The critic George Vertue floated the idea that the London Canaletto was an impostor, and his standing never fully recovered while he lived. Back in Venice, in 1765/1766, he drew the Giovedì Grasso festival before the Ducal Palace, acrobats stacked in a human pyramid over the crowd.
Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, Royal Collection, National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Portrait: Antonio Visentini.
