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Lot Essay
Few works encapsulate more vividly the emergence of Bernardo Bellotto’s independent artistic personality than this luminous veduta of the Grand Canal, looking north from the Rialto Bridge. Painted around 1738, when the artist was only sixteen or seventeen, it reveals not merely an apprentice imitating his uncle, Canaletto, but a precocious painter who, at the threshold of his career, was already capable of rivalling and at times surpassing his celebrated master. Long catalogued as Canaletto, its reattribution to Bellotto underscores how early and forcefully his distinctive voice manifested itself in Venice before he embarked on the great European capitals that would define his later fame.
Bellotto enrolled in the Venetian painters’ guild in 1738, his formative years spent in Canaletto’s bustling studio at a time when demand for views of Venice reached fever pitch among Grand Tour patrons. As an assistant, he had direct access to Canaletto’s designs, yet his early canvases show differences in tone and facture that mark him apart: cooler palettes of silvery blues and greys, sharper architectural definition and a predilection for crystalline light that lent Venice a clarity distinct from his uncle’s warmer, atmospheric harmonies. Until relatively recently, however, the originality of these youthful works was obscured. Much of Bellotto’s early output remained either unrecognised or subsumed within the corpus of Canaletto, assigned to anonymous studio assistants or even to the master himself. Stefan Kozakiewicz, in his pioneering 1972 monograph, could identify only six Venetian views that he considered securely autograph (op. cit.), choosing instead to focus on the artist’s mature northern cityscapes. Likewise, William George Constable’s authoritative catalogue, first published in 1962 and subsequently revised and updated (op. cit.), perpetuated these uncertainties, effectively leaving Bellotto’s early development uncharted. The situation was compounded by Links’s 1998 supplement (op. cit.), in which, despite growing evidence to the contrary, he maintained the attribution of this canvas to Canaletto, doubting that the young Bellotto was capable of such compositional refinement.
It was only through the systematic reassessments of Charles Beddington, Bożena Anna Kowalczyk and Dario Succi that the true extent of Bellotto’s Venetian vedute emerged (op. cit.), with Beddington’s 2004 study establishing the first coherent corpus of Bellotto’s early Venetian paintings and defining the stylistic hallmarks of his youthful manner (see C. Beddington, ‘Bernardo Bellotto and his circle in Italy. Part I: not Canaletto but Bellotto’, The Burlington Magazine, CXLVI, no. 1219, October 2004, pp. 665-74). Their combined scholarship restored to him a body of over sixty paintings once thought to be by Canaletto or his circle (see also D. Succi, in I. Reale and D. Succi (eds.), Luca Carlevarijs e la veduta veneziana del Settecento, exhibition catalogue, Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, 1994, pp. 51-58; B.A. Kowalczyk, Arte Veneta: ‘Il Bellotto veneziano nei documenti’, no. 47, 1995, pp. 68-77; ‘Il Bellotto veneziano: grande intendimento ricercasi’, ibid., 48, 1996, pp. 70-89; ‘I Canaletto della National Gallery di Londra’, ibid., 53, 1999, pp. 72-99; and Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, 23, 1999, pp. 191-218). It was within this context of renewed scrutiny that, at its appearance at auction in 2017, both Beddington and Kowalczyk independently identified this picture as the work of Bernardo Bellotto.
The composition itself closely relates to a celebrated set of four Grand Canal views painted by Canaletto for Charles Paulet, 3rd Duke of Bolton, around 1737, now in a private collection (see G. Knox, ‘Four Canaletti for the Duke of Bolton and two aide-mémoire’, Apollo, CXXXVIII, no. 380, October 1993, pp. 245-49, fig. 3). Other paintings by Bellotto depicting the same views as the Bolton series are known: the counterpart to this composition, The Grand Canal, looking south from the Ca' da Mosto towards the Rialto Bridge (fig. 1), once in the collection of Henry Oppenheimer in London and more recently in a private collection in the United States, dated by Beddington to around 1738; and A View of the Molo, looking west, likewise in private hands. Bellotto’s version follows its format with striking fidelity: the monumental Fabbriche Nuove anchoring the left foreground, the bustling Erberia with the campanile of San Giovanni Elemosinario behind, the sweep of palazzi leading past the Ca’ d’Oro to the Vendramin Calergi at the far turn of the canal. Yet in spirit it is another picture entirely. Where Canaletto’s scene is measured and lucid, Bellotto’s is animated, the morning sunlight flooding from the right rather than the left. The sky is built with diagonal strokes of impastoed cloud, the water enlivened by short horizontal strokes interlaced with the painter’s characteristic ‘joined-up W’s’ to describe ripples. The reflections are organised by incised verticals that extend from façades into the water, catching the light and guiding the rhythm of fenestration. These technical procedures – incisions marking rooflines and storeys, thick strokes describing chimneys and scaffolding – are hallmarks of Bellotto’s early style, lending the surface a richly tactile quality without descending into mechanical precision.
The immediacy of Bellotto’s vision is matched by his willingness to adapt. Figures are larger and more emphatically described than in Canaletto’s shorthand notations, architectural elements elongated, the contrasts of light and shade heightened. A small dog descending the steps at lower right mirrors the anecdotal detail in the Bolton Canaletto, yet the surrounding atmosphere is more charged, the palette brighter, the space more generous to sky and air. As Beddington has observed (ibid., 2004, p. 667), Bellotto would have had direct access to Canaletto’s Bolton set – probably painted before his eyes in around 1737 – so that the young painter’s reworking of this archetype becomes a conscious act of rivalry and independence. In this, Bellotto anticipated the monumental clarity that would later define his views of Dresden and Warsaw.
The view also resonates with Canaletto’s earlier treatments of the Rialto stretch of the Canal. His 1725 veduta for Stefano Conti shows the composition lit from the left (Private collection; Constable and Links, op. cit., 1989, II, no. 230), while the Royal Collection’s version, probably painted before 1735 for Consul Joseph Smith, preserves the enclosing wall at lower right and was engraved by Antonio Visentini for the Prospectus Magni Canalis Venetiarum in 1742. Bellotto’s canvas diverges pointedly: the wall is removed, replaced by the fondamenta where a gentleman stands facing the viewer; the light falls from the right, transfiguring the scene into a morning bustle of barges and gondolas. A drawing in pen and brown ink attributed to Canaletto, formerly in the collection of Dr Carlo M. Croce, depicts the same view, the canal-side bank carefully defined and annotated by the artist at the lower right with the inscription ‘Fondamenta’ (fig. 2; Links, op. cit., 1998, no. 592, pl. 239), suggesting that Bellotto may have drawn directly on studio material to elaborate his own variant.
The young painter’s capacity to rework Canaletto’s archetypes is again evident in commissions for Henry Howard, 4th Earl of Carlisle, who purchased a substantial group of Bellotto’s Venetian views during his sojourn in 1738-39. These include the Campo Santo Stefano (see B.A. Kowalczyk, Bernardo Bellotto and the Capitals of Europe, exhibition catalogue, Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, 2001, pp. 50-52, no. 3); the Libreria and Piazzetta (ibid., pp. 54-55, no. 4); and a View of the Grand Canal, looking south from the Palazzo Foscari and Palazzo Moro-Lin towards the church of Santa Maria della Carità (sold Sotheby’s, London, 8 July 2015, lot 21).
A note on the provenance:
The picture’s recorded history begins with Olive Louisa Blanche Guthrie (1872-1945), who, following the death of her husband Walter Murray Guthrie (1869-1911), retained the family’s Highland seat of Torosay Castle on the Isle of Mull (originally called Duart Castle) and her London residence at 9 Upper Berkeley Street. A merchant banker and Conservative Member of Parliament, Guthrie had inherited Torosay in 1897 from his uncle and undertook extensive refurbishments that transformed the mid-Victorian house into a baronial retreat overlooking the Sound of Mull. After his death, Mrs Guthrie – a spirited figure of artistic lineage, whose father, Sir John Leslie of Glaslough, was a painter active in the literary and artistic circles of Dickens, Leighton and Landseer – presided over the estate during a period of mounting financial reversals. Her sale in these Rooms on 11 March 1911 included the present picture, then catalogued as ‘B. Canaletto’, a notably early instance of the nephew’s initial being used to distinguish Bernardo Bellotto from his more famous uncle. That cautious yet telling designation reflects the state of connoisseurship at the turn of the century, when Bellotto’s authorship was beginning to be intuited but had not yet been firmly separated from that of Canaletto himself.
By 1932, the picture had entered the collection of Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere (1868-1940), one of the most successful newspaper magnates of the early twentieth century. It was in that same year that Tancred Borenius – Rembrandt scholar, leading expert on Italian art and close associate of Roger Fry – privately published a catalogue of Lord Rothermere’s pictures (op. cit.), together with the critic P.G. Konody, who advised Lord Rothermere in assembling a notable collection with remarkable speed. Rothermere’s holdings were posthumously dispersed in these Rooms on 19 December 1941. The present Grand Canal, looking north from the Rialto Bridge, then catalogued as a work by Canaletto, was one of only a handful of paintings illustrated in that sale, an indication of its perceived importance within the collection. The auction, distinguished by its strength in Venetian vedute, also included another view attributed to Bellotto of the Church of SS Giovanni e Paolo and no fewer than fourteen oils by Guardi, confirming the collector’s acute and fashionable preference for the Venetian tradition. It subsequently passed through the collection of J.V. Rank of London and then by descent, before resurfacing at Sotheby’s in 1992, again as Canaletto. Its recognition as Bellotto followed only later, through its circulation with major London and New York dealers, until its sale in 2017, when it assumed its rightful place as one of the keystones of Bellotto’s Venetian oeuvre.
Bellotto enrolled in the Venetian painters’ guild in 1738, his formative years spent in Canaletto’s bustling studio at a time when demand for views of Venice reached fever pitch among Grand Tour patrons. As an assistant, he had direct access to Canaletto’s designs, yet his early canvases show differences in tone and facture that mark him apart: cooler palettes of silvery blues and greys, sharper architectural definition and a predilection for crystalline light that lent Venice a clarity distinct from his uncle’s warmer, atmospheric harmonies. Until relatively recently, however, the originality of these youthful works was obscured. Much of Bellotto’s early output remained either unrecognised or subsumed within the corpus of Canaletto, assigned to anonymous studio assistants or even to the master himself. Stefan Kozakiewicz, in his pioneering 1972 monograph, could identify only six Venetian views that he considered securely autograph (op. cit.), choosing instead to focus on the artist’s mature northern cityscapes. Likewise, William George Constable’s authoritative catalogue, first published in 1962 and subsequently revised and updated (op. cit.), perpetuated these uncertainties, effectively leaving Bellotto’s early development uncharted. The situation was compounded by Links’s 1998 supplement (op. cit.), in which, despite growing evidence to the contrary, he maintained the attribution of this canvas to Canaletto, doubting that the young Bellotto was capable of such compositional refinement.
It was only through the systematic reassessments of Charles Beddington, Bożena Anna Kowalczyk and Dario Succi that the true extent of Bellotto’s Venetian vedute emerged (op. cit.), with Beddington’s 2004 study establishing the first coherent corpus of Bellotto’s early Venetian paintings and defining the stylistic hallmarks of his youthful manner (see C. Beddington, ‘Bernardo Bellotto and his circle in Italy. Part I: not Canaletto but Bellotto’, The Burlington Magazine, CXLVI, no. 1219, October 2004, pp. 665-74). Their combined scholarship restored to him a body of over sixty paintings once thought to be by Canaletto or his circle (see also D. Succi, in I. Reale and D. Succi (eds.), Luca Carlevarijs e la veduta veneziana del Settecento, exhibition catalogue, Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, 1994, pp. 51-58; B.A. Kowalczyk, Arte Veneta: ‘Il Bellotto veneziano nei documenti’, no. 47, 1995, pp. 68-77; ‘Il Bellotto veneziano: grande intendimento ricercasi’, ibid., 48, 1996, pp. 70-89; ‘I Canaletto della National Gallery di Londra’, ibid., 53, 1999, pp. 72-99; and Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, 23, 1999, pp. 191-218). It was within this context of renewed scrutiny that, at its appearance at auction in 2017, both Beddington and Kowalczyk independently identified this picture as the work of Bernardo Bellotto.
The composition itself closely relates to a celebrated set of four Grand Canal views painted by Canaletto for Charles Paulet, 3rd Duke of Bolton, around 1737, now in a private collection (see G. Knox, ‘Four Canaletti for the Duke of Bolton and two aide-mémoire’, Apollo, CXXXVIII, no. 380, October 1993, pp. 245-49, fig. 3). Other paintings by Bellotto depicting the same views as the Bolton series are known: the counterpart to this composition, The Grand Canal, looking south from the Ca' da Mosto towards the Rialto Bridge (fig. 1), once in the collection of Henry Oppenheimer in London and more recently in a private collection in the United States, dated by Beddington to around 1738; and A View of the Molo, looking west, likewise in private hands. Bellotto’s version follows its format with striking fidelity: the monumental Fabbriche Nuove anchoring the left foreground, the bustling Erberia with the campanile of San Giovanni Elemosinario behind, the sweep of palazzi leading past the Ca’ d’Oro to the Vendramin Calergi at the far turn of the canal. Yet in spirit it is another picture entirely. Where Canaletto’s scene is measured and lucid, Bellotto’s is animated, the morning sunlight flooding from the right rather than the left. The sky is built with diagonal strokes of impastoed cloud, the water enlivened by short horizontal strokes interlaced with the painter’s characteristic ‘joined-up W’s’ to describe ripples. The reflections are organised by incised verticals that extend from façades into the water, catching the light and guiding the rhythm of fenestration. These technical procedures – incisions marking rooflines and storeys, thick strokes describing chimneys and scaffolding – are hallmarks of Bellotto’s early style, lending the surface a richly tactile quality without descending into mechanical precision.
The immediacy of Bellotto’s vision is matched by his willingness to adapt. Figures are larger and more emphatically described than in Canaletto’s shorthand notations, architectural elements elongated, the contrasts of light and shade heightened. A small dog descending the steps at lower right mirrors the anecdotal detail in the Bolton Canaletto, yet the surrounding atmosphere is more charged, the palette brighter, the space more generous to sky and air. As Beddington has observed (ibid., 2004, p. 667), Bellotto would have had direct access to Canaletto’s Bolton set – probably painted before his eyes in around 1737 – so that the young painter’s reworking of this archetype becomes a conscious act of rivalry and independence. In this, Bellotto anticipated the monumental clarity that would later define his views of Dresden and Warsaw.
The view also resonates with Canaletto’s earlier treatments of the Rialto stretch of the Canal. His 1725 veduta for Stefano Conti shows the composition lit from the left (Private collection; Constable and Links, op. cit., 1989, II, no. 230), while the Royal Collection’s version, probably painted before 1735 for Consul Joseph Smith, preserves the enclosing wall at lower right and was engraved by Antonio Visentini for the Prospectus Magni Canalis Venetiarum in 1742. Bellotto’s canvas diverges pointedly: the wall is removed, replaced by the fondamenta where a gentleman stands facing the viewer; the light falls from the right, transfiguring the scene into a morning bustle of barges and gondolas. A drawing in pen and brown ink attributed to Canaletto, formerly in the collection of Dr Carlo M. Croce, depicts the same view, the canal-side bank carefully defined and annotated by the artist at the lower right with the inscription ‘Fondamenta’ (fig. 2; Links, op. cit., 1998, no. 592, pl. 239), suggesting that Bellotto may have drawn directly on studio material to elaborate his own variant.
The young painter’s capacity to rework Canaletto’s archetypes is again evident in commissions for Henry Howard, 4th Earl of Carlisle, who purchased a substantial group of Bellotto’s Venetian views during his sojourn in 1738-39. These include the Campo Santo Stefano (see B.A. Kowalczyk, Bernardo Bellotto and the Capitals of Europe, exhibition catalogue, Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, 2001, pp. 50-52, no. 3); the Libreria and Piazzetta (ibid., pp. 54-55, no. 4); and a View of the Grand Canal, looking south from the Palazzo Foscari and Palazzo Moro-Lin towards the church of Santa Maria della Carità (sold Sotheby’s, London, 8 July 2015, lot 21).
A note on the provenance:
The picture’s recorded history begins with Olive Louisa Blanche Guthrie (1872-1945), who, following the death of her husband Walter Murray Guthrie (1869-1911), retained the family’s Highland seat of Torosay Castle on the Isle of Mull (originally called Duart Castle) and her London residence at 9 Upper Berkeley Street. A merchant banker and Conservative Member of Parliament, Guthrie had inherited Torosay in 1897 from his uncle and undertook extensive refurbishments that transformed the mid-Victorian house into a baronial retreat overlooking the Sound of Mull. After his death, Mrs Guthrie – a spirited figure of artistic lineage, whose father, Sir John Leslie of Glaslough, was a painter active in the literary and artistic circles of Dickens, Leighton and Landseer – presided over the estate during a period of mounting financial reversals. Her sale in these Rooms on 11 March 1911 included the present picture, then catalogued as ‘B. Canaletto’, a notably early instance of the nephew’s initial being used to distinguish Bernardo Bellotto from his more famous uncle. That cautious yet telling designation reflects the state of connoisseurship at the turn of the century, when Bellotto’s authorship was beginning to be intuited but had not yet been firmly separated from that of Canaletto himself.
By 1932, the picture had entered the collection of Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere (1868-1940), one of the most successful newspaper magnates of the early twentieth century. It was in that same year that Tancred Borenius – Rembrandt scholar, leading expert on Italian art and close associate of Roger Fry – privately published a catalogue of Lord Rothermere’s pictures (op. cit.), together with the critic P.G. Konody, who advised Lord Rothermere in assembling a notable collection with remarkable speed. Rothermere’s holdings were posthumously dispersed in these Rooms on 19 December 1941. The present Grand Canal, looking north from the Rialto Bridge, then catalogued as a work by Canaletto, was one of only a handful of paintings illustrated in that sale, an indication of its perceived importance within the collection. The auction, distinguished by its strength in Venetian vedute, also included another view attributed to Bellotto of the Church of SS Giovanni e Paolo and no fewer than fourteen oils by Guardi, confirming the collector’s acute and fashionable preference for the Venetian tradition. It subsequently passed through the collection of J.V. Rank of London and then by descent, before resurfacing at Sotheby’s in 1992, again as Canaletto. Its recognition as Bellotto followed only later, through its circulation with major London and New York dealers, until its sale in 2017, when it assumed its rightful place as one of the keystones of Bellotto’s Venetian oeuvre.