56. Venice: Caprice View with
Palladio’s Design for the Rialto, 1744.
Oil on canvas, 90 x 130.2 cm.
The Royal Collection, London.
His Trips to London
Intoxicated by the city of Venice, Canaletto, for the most part, stayed put. He left the city and only rarely, travelling mostly to nearby cities such as Verona and Padua, only twice did he venture as far as England. By contrast, most Venetian painters led a quasi-nomadic existence, willingly bringing their talent to the European courts where poets and musicians of their nationality had preceded them.
In this way, artists liked to travel across Europe, as they had since the eighteenth century. Although he participated very little in this movement, Canaletto still had success in London, Paris, Vienna and smaller courts in the north, locations shining like exotic mirages that attracted the majority of Venetian painters from beyond their city on wooden piles. In an era when postal messengers departed according to their own schedule, and didn’t always arrive at their destination, when coach postilions, who often lacked relay drivers, slept in roadside ditches, it is surprising to see with what happy-go-lucky ease artists, musicians, singers, dancers, men of letters, adventurers and courtesans left their hometowns, moved about, facing the perils and fatigue of the road. Sebastiano Ricci led the life of a continual wanderer; Tiepolo died in Spain while he was a court painter; others left for Vienna, Dresden and Warsaw, like Bellotto; some, like Pietro Rotari, worked for the Empress of Russia in Saint Petersburg. Some lesser known artists committed themselves to the inactive but dilettante principicules, whose fortunes were royally squandered for the greater good of artists.
In a certain way, they were infinitely less stationary and attached to their habits than the artists of the previous century, who, despite the increasing ease of travel, stayed at home, scornful of voyages abroad and hesitant to remain too long away from their customary centres of existence.
In accord with his century, then, and in spite of his sedentary nature, we find the Venetian Canaletto along the banks of the River Thames between 1746 and 1748. He was already fifty years old when he travelled to London. All the artists who were then travelling, through their example, implored him to do the same. While in England, he heard the news of Philippe Meusnier’s death, a painter of urban landscapes that, in all likelihood, he met in Venice, because he had already gained a reputation there as a famous master of perspective, well before he decorated the chapel at Versailles. Canaletto, who went to England on the advice of the busy intermediary, Consul Joseph Smith, almost bumped into Reynolds, who was going to Italy, and also Tiepolo, his friend, and perhaps his sometime collaborator who had just finished the frescoes in Würzburg, which can still be seen there today. The Venetian arrived in London at the same time that Handel was enjoying such great success and when people were singing the praises of his Judas Maccabaeus. He also learned that his nephew Bellotto, who was then in Poland, was well on his way to establishing a name for himself in Warsaw’s grand and wealthy high society.