N owhere is Francesco Guardi’s creative ability more evident than in his imaginary and fantastical landscapes, generally grouped under the broad term “capricci.” In fact, his fertile imagination conceived not just fanciful ruins—those paintings that are normally associated with the genre—but also courtyards and palaces, ports and shipwrecks. While Guardi was not the first of the Venetian vedutisti to create them—Marco Ricci, Canaletto, and Marieschi had all produced such works—Guardi most fully explored their possibilities, producing examples of such varying types and on such a range of scales that the genre has largely become associated with him alone.

This painting is an excellent example of Guardi’s preferred subject for his capricci: ruined classical monuments next to lagoon-like bodies of water. It is painted on panel, a support the artist favored for work on this scale, and one that allowed the full effect of his signature rapid brushwork. Guardi paints an ancient archway, overgrown with weeds, set on a quayside, seeming to invent for Venice a Roman past that alone of all the great Italian cities it lacked. Such compositions were popular with his contemporaries and even appear in the collection of at least one of his most important clients; John Strange, the British Resident at Venice from 1773-1788, an avid (if critical) patron of Guardi, had at least two such “arch-way” paintings listed in his 1799 sale catalogue.¹

 
The composition is a variation on a theme that Guardi explored on numerous occasions. It includes elements that Guardi repeated in other compositions but is most closely connected with another version formerly with Agnew’s, London, and whose current location is unknown.² In addition, there are two related drawings for this painting, one formerly in the collection of Guy du Boisrouvray³ and another formerly in the von Wrangell collection.⁴

¹ Strange judged that Guardi had too much “spirit” in his work, and not enough “truth,” tendencies that today would be regarded as positives in a painter. See J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800, New Haven and London 1997, p. 904. In 1799, Strange’s large collection of paintings was put up for private sale, and featured numerous paintings by Guardi, including lots 205, “View of an arch-way” and 427, “An arch-way…very small.”

² Morassi 1984, vol. I, pp. 485-486, cat. no. 947; vol. II, reproduced fig. 838.

³ Sold Sotheby’s, New York, 27 October 1989, lot 74 (as one of a pair).

⁴ Sold Sotheby’s, London, 24 March 1972, lot 130. See Morassi 1993, p. 187, cat. nos. 636, 637.