This beautiful Venetian view is an incredibly exciting rediscovery. Previously unknown, it is a significant addition to the earliest body of work known of Canaletto and preserves the free brushwork and atmospheric palette that are the lyrical hallmarks of his very youthful career. Dated to about 1725, this canvas was painted just before one of Canaletto’s most important early commissions—a set of four views commissioned by the Lucchese textile merchant Stefano Conti in August and November of that year.

Among those four canvases commissioned by Conti, all of which are today preserved in the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, is a comparable view of the Grand Canal and the Rialto Bridge (fig. 1). In both examples, a three-story Palazzo, probably the Palazzo Civran, extends vertically along the left edge of the composition. Next to this Palazzo appears a sun-lit Fondaco dei Tedeschi, originally the warehouse and residence of the German traders in the city, whose brightly lit facade provides contrast to the shadowy structures nearby, that of the Rialto Bridge and the Palazzo dei Camerlinghi. To the far-right appears the campo, occupied in the mornings often by the fruit and vegetable markets. While both paintings share much of the same architecture and a similar arrangement of staffage and vessels, the most prominent difference between the two is the boat painted in the lower central foreground. In the Agnelli version, one sees a private barge with four gondoliers filled with figures beneath an awning, while in the present appears a smaller vessel with one gondolier and what appears to be a seated couple.

Canaletto returned to this particular view of the bustling area around the Rialto, the main commercial hub of Venice, on numerous occasions throughout his early career. In such works, as visible in the present example, he captured the astounding architecture so emblematic of the city’s internationally revered mercantile and governmental systems. In addition to a related preparatory drawing Canaletto made of this particular view (fig. 2),¹ today preserved in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, two other variations of the same theme are known: one copper commissioned by Owen McSwiney in the fall of 1727² and another canvas from about the same period, today in a private collection.³ A slightly later variation is today preserved in the Royal Collection Trust.⁴

Charles Beddington, to whom we are grateful, has identified this painting as an early work by Canaletto.

_{1. Pen and brown ink with red and black chalk, 14 by 20.2 cm, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Inscribed in Canaletto's hand: Veduta del ponte di rialto infacza lerberia (View of the Rialto Bridge opposite the Vegetable Market). See K. Baetjer and J.G. Links, Canaletto, exhibition catalogue, New York 1989, pp. 280-281, cat. no. 86, reproduced.}

_{2. Oil on copper, 45.7 by 61 cm, The Trustees of the Goodwood Collections. Baetjer and Links 1989, pp. 105-108, cat. no. 15, reproduced.}

_{3. Oil on canvas, 58 by 85 cm, private collection. Baetjer and Links 1989, pp. 124-127, cat. no. 24, reproduced.}

_{4. Oil on canvas, 47.5 by 79.9 cm, RCIN 400668. https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/49/collection/400668/the-rialto-bridge-from-the-north}