Important Old Master Paintings

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Lot 70
  • 70

Attributed to Bernardo Bellotto Venice 1721-1780 Warsaw

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Description

  • Canaletto
  • A View in Venice from the Punta della Dogana towards San Giorgio Maggiore
  • oil on canvas

Provenance

Anonymous sale, Paris, Sedelmeyer Galerie, March 25, 1892, lot 28 (as Canaletto);
Purchased by the family of the present owner in the 1920s.

Literature

W.G. Constable, Canaletto. Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, vol. II, Oxford 1976, 1989 (second edition revised by J.G. Links) p. 336, under no. 299b ("from a reproduction, a school piece").

Catalogue Note

The present composition relates closely to a painting of the same view attributed to Canaletto in the collection of H.M. the Queen, Windsor Castle (for illustration see Constable 1989, no. 299, pl. 57). For topographical reasons both paintings are dateable to after 1728, when the onion shaped spire was added to the Campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore. The view is repeated again in a painting, formerly attributed to Bernardo Belotto and now attributed to Canaletto sold at Sotheby’s, London, 6 December, 1989, lot 14 (see Constable & Links, supplement, London 1998, no. 299c). There is also a related drawing of this composition that is attributed to the young Bernardo Belotto from circa 1735-38 in the collection of the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt (for illustration see S. Kozakiewicz, Bernardo Bellotto, Catalogue, vol. II, p. 416, no. Z104). The composition and the grouping of the gondolas and figures in the Darmstadt drawing correspond almost exactly to the present work.