Venice, the Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day

This monumental view of Venice on the Feast of Ascension Day, with its virtuoso brushwork and daring design, has been described by Charles Beddington as ‘by far the most impressive Italian view executed by Canaletto during his years in England’. Painted in about 1754, it constitutes the artist’s final rendition, from this viewpoint, of a theme that Canaletto had made popular from the 1730s onwards and is unique for being of vertical format. This painting is first recorded in the eighteenth century at Ockham Park in Surrey and is a rare view of Venice painted by Canaletto in England, thus providing an essential point of reference for the artist’s years of activity in London (1746–55).

The original patron is likely to have been Thomas King, later 5th Baron King (1712–1779) and the painting remained in the ownership of the King family for almost two centuries. When the view last appeared at auction in 2005 at Christie’s, sold as part of the outstanding collection amassed by the influential Portuguese financier António Champalimaud, it had not been seen publicly for more than thirty years. Its relative inaccessibility goes some way to explain why the painting was largely overlooked in the twentieth-century literature on Canaletto. Indeed, it was not until the Christie’s 2005 sale that the picture was studied in detail for the first time by Charles Beddington and Francis Russell.

The view is taken from the Riva degli Schiavoni, whose waterfront paving has been set at an exaggerated angle in the foreground and looks west towards the Bacino di San Marco and the mouth of the Grand Canal. This adjusted viewpoint provided Canaletto with an opportunity to paint many of the city’s key landmarks – the Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute at far left, the Zecca, Libreria and Piazzetta (with Saints Mark and Theodore surmounting columns) across the water, and the Palazzo Ducale, Palazzo delle Prigioni, and the towering Campanile at the right of the composition. In the center is the Bucintoro, the ceremonial barge of the Doge of Venice and symbol of the Serenissima, with numerous gondolas and spectators dotted around the Bacino.

Occurring on the fortieth day after Easter Sunday, the Feast of Ascension Day (Festa della Sensa) was the most spectacular of the city’s annual festivals and remained a key date in the Venetian calendar until the fall of the Republic in 1797. Accompanied by the city’s officials, the doge would sail out to the Lido on the Bucintoro and cast a ring into the water – an act symbolising the marriage of Venice to the sea – whilst proclaiming the words: ‘Desponsamus te, mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii’ (‘We wed thee, sea, as a sign of true and everlasting domination’). Here, the Bucintoro has returned to the Molo after the ceremony, as indicated by the direction of light and by the prow of the vessel facing east. The feast brought the entire city together and enabled Canaletto to populate the familiar setting of the lagoon with lively boats and figures enjoying the pomp and ceremony of the occasion.

Given the popularity of Ascension Day among tourists in Venice, views of the Feast by Canaletto were in particular demand and several different treatments of the celebrations by the artist are known. It is particularly instructive to see how the present painting – the ‘Lovelace Canaletto’ – relates to other views seen from a similar angle, the earliest of which is that formerly in the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, sold at Christie’s, London, 1 July 2025, lot 8. In that horizontal view the composition extends marginally to the left (to include the tip of the Punta della Dogana) but crops the Palazzo delle Prigioni after the fifth (out of seven) arches at the extreme right. The larger view at Woburn, painted for the Duke of Bedford in 1732-36, completes the Dogana and extends at right to include the buildings adjacent to the Palazzo delle Prigioni (Constable, no. 332; Beddington, op. cit., 2021, pp. 175-183). The impressive large-scale variant in the National Gallery (fig. 2), almost certainly commissioned by the 4th Duke of Leeds who was in Venice in 1734, is framed like the Lovelace Canaletto at the right margin but extends further on the left to encompass the Zattere (Constable, no. 643).

This grand representation of the greatest ceremony in Venice once formed part of an ambitious decorative scheme comprising six other paintings by Canaletto, constituting what has been described as ‘the most substantial achievement of Canaletto’s last years in London’ (F. Russell, op. cit., 2006, p. 46). The series, dispersed in 1937, remained in the possession of the Earls of Lovelace for six generations. The pictures were initially very probably at Ockham Park in Ripley, Surrey, which was extensively remodelled in an Italianate style in the early nineteenth century and severely damaged by fire in 1949. The 1st Earl of Lovelace, Lord Byron’s son-in-law, purchased Horsley Towers in East Horsley in 1840 and subsequently moved there. The Canalettos presumably returned to Ockham when the house became the 2nd Earl’s main residence again and were then taken to Whitwell Hatch in Haslemere in the 1920s, when the 3rd Earl moved there towards the end of his life. The other six canvases in the group, known as ‘The Lovelace Capriccios’ on the grounds that they are to a greater or lesser degree fantastical, were reunited in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1989. All seven canvases are stylistically homogeneous and share an unusually light, bright tonality which befits works intended for a decorative scheme. One of the set, Capriccio: a Sluice on a River with a Chapel (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), is the only painting in the group that is signed with initials ‘A.C.’ and dated ‘1754’ on the keystone of the arch beside the sluice (fig. 3). Two further capricci in the set are in the National Gallery of Art, Washington: English Landscape Capriccio with a Column and English Landscape Capriccio with a Palace (figs. 4 and 5). Both have elements that make specific reference to Great Bookham and Box Hill, sites south-east of Ockham, and have been described as ‘the most exceptionally improbable, and successful, pictures of this type that Canaletto ever painted’ (K. Baetjer and J.G. Links eds., Canaletto, exhibition catalogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1989, p. 259). The other three paintings in the series, The Island of San Michele with Venice in the distance (Constable, no. 367) and two capricci (Constable, nos. 478 and 504), are in private collections. As noted by Russell, the stylistic coherence of the group implies that all seven paintings were painted in or around 1754, although it might be argued that the date on the Boston capriccio marks the completion of the commission (and consequently some of the pictures were executed slightly earlier).

Four brothers succeeded at Ockham in close succession: John, 2nd Lord King, who died without issue in 1740; Peter, 3rd Lord King, who died unmarried in 1754; William, 4th Lord King, also unmarried, who died in 1767, and Thomas, 5th Baron King (1712–1779). The last of these ‘was a partner in a Dutch mercantile house’ (The Complete Peerage, VII, p. 277) and married an heiress, Catherine Troye, in Delft in 1734. He consequently had the means to commission a large decorative scheme from the highly fashionable painter Canaletto, and Constable records the ‘family tradition’ that the paintings ‘were acquired with money brought into the family by the [5th Lord King’s] wife’ (Constable, op. cit., 1962, I, p. 146). Furthermore, Thomas and Catherine’s son was sent to Eton, whose chapel is clearly evoked in the building at left in the Boston capriccio, lending further support to the idea that the 5th Baron King commissioned the series from Canaletto in or around 1754.

There is no incontrovertible evidence regarding the paintings’ original destination and, at the time of the 2005 sale, Venice, the Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day was thought to have been the centerpiece of the series. Russell has tentatively proposed that the paintings may have been commissioned for a London residence rather than for the family seat at Ockham (op. cit., 1993). He has also convincingly argued that the present painting was more likely displayed in a different room from the two upright capricci in Washington, given that they are of similar dimensions (op. cit., 2006). In contrast to the other canvases in the series which incorporate some imaginary elements and combine architectural motifs ‘in the interest of the picturesque’ (Baetjer and Links, op. cit., p. 256), the view in Venice, the Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day would have been instantly recognizable. Its format suggests it was almost certainly intended as an overmantel, a precedent for which is Canaletto’s square canvas of the same subject (though with a more frontal view) at Holkham Hall in Norfolk (Constable, no. 342; fig. 6). That picture was painted in around 1739 for Thomas Coke, Lord Lovel and later 1st Earl of Leicester (1697–1759), and is recorded by the architect Matthew Brettingham as hanging ‘over the Chimney’ in Lady Leicester’s Bedchamber (M. Brettingham, The Plans, Elevations and Sections of Holkham in Norfolk…, London, 1773, p. 14; Russell, op. cit., 2006, p. 46). An almost identical version of the composition by Bernardo Bellotto is at Audley End (English Heritage) in Essex.

As is evident from the 1937 sale catalogue, the Canalettos (lots 129-135) formed part of a considerably larger group of vedute and landscapes in the King collection. These included further works by Canaletto (lots 84-86) and three views of Rome by Bernardo Bellotto; two upright (lots 82 and 83; sold in these Rooms, 12 December 1993, lot 60; figs. 7 and 8) and one of the Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano, then ascribed to Canaletto (lot 128; offered Sotheby’s, London, 7 July 2005, lot 51; fig. 9). There were Roman capricci by Giovanni Paolo Panini (lots 106 and 107), six landscapes by Canaletto’s Venetian contemporary, Francesco Zuccarelli (lots 119-125), and four pictures by Claude-Joseph Vernet (lots 114-117), two of which were specifically ordered on Thomas King’s behalf and are today in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles (see note in Christie’s 2005 sale catalogue for the identification of these and other views in the 1937 sale). The predominance of view paintings in the collection by many of the leading eighteenth-century artists in the genre would have represented a ‘virtual’ Grand Tour. As noted by Russell, ‘taken together, [these views] must have made a dominant impression in the collection’; particularly since there do not appear to have been any significant old masters besides a painting by Jan Steen (lot 110). The sale was widely covered in the press and the Canalettos were singled out specifically by several newspapers: one noted, for example, that ‘Lord Lovelace’s Canalettos are among the best and are fine architectural views drawn with the fidelity and richness of detail that characterised the artist’s work’ (The Evening News, 29 June 1937).

Canaletto chose varying viewpoints for his pictures of the Bucintoro at the Molo. Those taken from this oblique angle, rather than from a point further west facing the Palazzo Ducale, make for a particularly dramatic line-up of Venice’s principal landmarks. For this painting, and other renditions of the theme, such as that in the National Gallery, London, Canaletto probably had recourse to his much earlier pen-and-ink drawing of about 1734, now in the Royal Collection (inv. RCIN 907453; M. Clayton, Canaletto in Venice, London, 2005, pp. 112-113, no. 28, illus.). In the Christie’s 2005 sale catalogue, Beddington proposed that Canaletto must have taken the sheet to England with him before delivering it after his return to Venice to Consul Joseph Smith (c.1674-1770), by whom it was sold to King George III in 1762.

Though the arrangement of boats differs in the painting and drawing, the architecture is faithfully reproduced and the lateral crop of the composition is the same, with the inclusion of all seven arches of the Palazzo delle Prigioni at extreme right. Crucially, however, Canaletto has had to adapt the composition from a horizontal to a vertical format for the painting. The Campanile has been modified and its tower is visibly more elongated here, perhaps to echo the upright format of the canvas and to provide a high point of interest in the vast expanse of sky. The vertical treatment of the subject presented the artist with further challenges, necessitating the reconfiguration of certain elements to varying extremes. Canaletto sets the Fondamenta of the Riva degli Schiavoni at an exaggerated angle in the foreground, showing complete disregard for topographical precision. As noted by Viola Pemberton-Pigott, ‘it is rarely possible to stand in the presumed position of the painter’ (V. Pemberton-Pigott, ‘The Development of Canaletto’s Painting Technique’, in Baetjer and Links, op. cit., 1989, p. 54). The paved waterfront has been set at a slant here for the sole purpose of serving as a stage on which to position the principal characters. Two Venetians wearing white masks stand either side of a boy holding a basket, an elegant patrician is seen from behind conversing with figures in a gondola below, anchoring the composition lower left. The prow of a gondola fills the compositional vacuum lower centre, where two seated figures and a dog gather at the steps which facilitate landing, alighting and the (un)loading of goods. These individuals give the scene a sense of actuality as well as providing a platform for us, as viewers, to survey the city as ceremony.

The individualized figures in the foreground stand firmly in space. Canaletto’s confident application of paint is demonstrated in his bold description of a profile, a hand or a ponytail with just a few deftly applied strokes. By contrast, the gondoliers gathered around the Bucintoro in the middle ground are more schematic, and the distant crowd gathered on the Molo is made up of the ‘calligraphic squiggles’ that characterize Canaletto’s later works. The painting as a whole is unusually bright; its luminous quality owing to a pale ground and Canaletto having given over more than half the canvas to the vast expanse of sky. The pinkish clouds echo the tonality of the brickwork on the façade of the Palazzo Ducale, leading the viewer’s eye around a carefully choreographed scene with deliberately positioned accents of color: what Pemberton-Pigott has described as ‘a mosaic of colour and pattern’ that is typical of Canaletto’s years in England (op. cit., p. 62). As was customary with Canaletto, the artist completed the sky first, then the architecture and water, painting in the boats and figures last.

A surprising detail is the presence of a figure in Chinese costume in a gondola in the right foreground. An analogous figure appears in another of the Lovelace paintings, Canaletto’s English Landscape Capriccio with a Palace in Washington and in other English-period capricci that were painted for patrons who had a particular predilection for chinoiserie; a fanciful style inspired by art and design from China, Japan and other Asian countries, which was at its height in Britain from 1750 to 1765 (see Beddington, op. cit., 2006, p. 24 and p. 196, under cat. 70). Since such men in Chinese costume are not found in Canaletto’s paintings produced in Italy, Beddington has suggested that their presence may be a subtle reference to the ‘magnificent new built barge, after the Venitian manner, and the watermen in Chinese habits’; a barge carrying Prince George that was rowed down the River Thames to celebrate his twelfth birthday, as described in The Gentleman’s Magazine in May 1749 (p. 235; cited by Beddington, ibid., p. 26). In August of the same year, the Prince of Wales was seen riding what must have been the same boat, described as ‘his Chinese barge, and the rowers in Chinese habits’ (The Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1749, p. 377; cited by Beddington, ibid.). Such reference would not have been lost on Canaletto’s contemporaries in London.

This is unquestionably the most spectacular view of Venice painted by Canaletto in England. A masterpiece in its own right, the painting justifiably broke all previous auction records for the artist when it was sold in 2005. It is a supreme example of the ‘distinguished English style’ Canaletto developed whilst in England (1746-55), amply demonstrating the artist’s bravura handling of paint and boundless imagination in bringing the pomp and ceremony of the Venetian lagoon to life.