PROVENANCE -

Anon. Sale, Christie’s, New York, 11 January 1989, lot 69, as by Canaletto.

Private Collection, Sicily, as by Canaletto.

LITERATURE -

C. Beddington, ‘Bernardo Bellotto and his circle in Italy, Part I: Not Canaletto but Bellotto’, The Burlington Magazine, CXLVI, No. 1219, October 2004, p. 670, note 37.

This drawing is page 52 from a sketchbook of which nine other sheets are known, some drawn on both sides, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (two); the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (two); the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Courtauld Institute and in private collections. [1] They are distinguished by their numbering (between 11 and 60), to which is added the inscription ‘uolta’ when the sheet is drawn on both sides. The figure studies are of two types. Two sheets, in the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,[2] each show a single figure on each side and are more Canalettesque than the others. The two figures in the Courtauld sheet correspond closely with two figures in the right foreground in Canaletto’s Campo di Rialto and S. Giacomo di Rialto in the National Gallery of Canada,[3] datable to the mid-1740s.[4] The majority of the drawings show groups of figures. Although one of them[5] shows a group which occupies the left foreground of Canaletto’s The Piazzetta, looking North, signed and dated 24 October 1743, in the Royal Collection,[6] it recurs in part in Bellotto’s The Altmarkt, Dresden, from Seestrasse of 1749–51 in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden,[7] as Michael Pantazzi has pointed out.[8] A more elaborate group is depicted on the verso of a sheet sold at auction in 2000 and purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum.[9] This type of drawing differs from Canaletto’s drawings in the concentration on outline, rendering the figures rather flat, the way that the ground slopes up the page, which has a similar effect on the space, and the same sort of tendency towards caricature in the faces and attitudes that one sees in Bellotto’s early painted figures. The artistic approach is consistent with much later Bellotto drawings now in the National Museum, Warsaw.[10]Curiously, the drawing style resembles more closely that of Luca Carlevarijs than Canaletto. Pantazzi has pointed out that several of the figures do, in fact, derive from Carlevarijs drawings,[11] and more recently Isabella Reale has recognised[12] that several of the figures in one of the sheets in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin[13] are closely related to figures in Carlevarijs’ Regatta on the Grand Canal in Honour of Frederick IV, King of Denmark at Frederiksborg.[14]

Four of the drawings are architectural studies. On the recto of the Getty drawing is a view of The North Side of the Campo S. Basso, with the Church, which is intimately connected to a drawing of the adjoining buildings at Berlin,[15] which, numbered ‘59’, must have been the next page, as inscriptions on both confirm. Both drawings are further inscribed extensively with notes such as ‘peruchier’ (‘wigmaker’) and ‘più basso di questi’ (‘lower than these’). All the inscriptions in the sketchbook seem to be in the handwriting of Canaletto, but the uncertain perspective, particularly obvious towards the left of the Getty sheet distances them from the structural confidence of Canaletto drawings such as those in the Accademia sketchbook and rules out a draughtsman of such experience as a candidate for the drawings themselves. Larissa Haskell first suggested Bellotto as the author of one of the sheets of figure studies in 1972,[16] and her idea was subsequently discussed at some length by Terisio Pignatti, who saw Canaletto’s authorship of the single figure sheets and Bellotto’s of the groups as ‘a hypothesis not easily rejected’.[17] There seems no reason to doubt that all the sheets come from the same sketchbook, and Beddington, loc. cit., proposed Bellotto as the only possible candidate for the authorship of all the drawings, with the possible exception of the single figure studies, the inscriptions on them by Canaletto showing the master commenting on his pupil’s work and adding notes to assist their possible later use in the studio. The attribution has since been endorsed by Bozena Kowalczyk,[18] and is generally accepted.[19]

This sheet was until recently obscured by graphite shading. The figure of a youth in a turban in a sandalo resembles one in Canaletto’s Accademia sketchbook, sheet 7v.

[1] See W.G. Constable, Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, 2nd edition edited by J.G. Links, Oxford, 1976, nos. 540–41, 555 and 837–40*****, W.G. Constable: Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, 2nd edition edited by J.G. Links, reissued with supplement and additional plates, Oxford, 1989, I, pp. lxxxiii–lxxxvi, and J.G. Links: A Supplement to W.G. Constable’s Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, London, 1998, no. 541*.

[2] Constable/Links 1976, nos.839 and 840; numbered ‘11’ and ‘40’ respectively. The latter was included in K. Baetjer and J.G. Links, catalogue of the exhibition Canaletto, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989–90, no. 126.

[3] Constable, no. 298.

[4] The suggestion in R. Bromberg, Canaletto’s Etchings, London and New York, 1974, p. 51, that the verso was also used for Canaletto’s etching Mestre (her no. 3) seems unconvincing.

[5] Constable/Links 1976, no. 840**.

[6] Constable, no. 68.

[7] S. Kozakiewicz, Bernardo Bellotto, Recklinghausen and London, 1972, no. 176.

[8] M. Laskin, Jr. and M. Pantazzi, Catalogue of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, European and American Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, I: 1300–1800, Ottawa, 1987, text volume, p. 53.

[9] Sale Sotheby’s, New York, 26 January 2000, lot 43, as Canaletto. The sheet is Constable/Links 1976, no. 541, although the appearance of the verso was unknown before the 2000 sale.

[10] See, for instance, Kozakiewicz, nos. 251, 321B, 336 and 364-71.

[11] Laskin and Pantazzi, op. cit. (note 8), pp. 53-4.

[12] I. Reale and D. Succi, Catalogue of the exhibition Luca Carlevarijs e la veduta veneziana del Settecento, Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, 1994, p. 113 and fig. 3, as Canaletto.

[13] Constable, no. 837(2).

[14] A. Rizzi, Luca Carlevarijs, Venice, 1967, pls. 35–7.

[15] Constable, no. 540; Baetjer and Links, op. cit. (note 2), no. 125.

[16] L. Haskell: ‘Venetian Drawings at the Heim Gallery’, The Burlington Magazine, CXIV, 1972, p. 193.

[17] T. Pignatti: ‘Venetian Drawings of the Eighteenth Century’, Master Drawings, 11, 1973, pp. 182-3.

[18] B.A. Kowalczyk, Catalogue of the exhibition Canaletto: Il trionfo della veduta, Palazzo Giustiniani, Rome, 2005, pp. 204-13, nos. 51-4, loc. cit., 2016-17, and elsewhere.

[19] Sotheby’s, London, however, offered a sheet as Canaletto as recently as 5 July 2017, lot 48.