18th Century Paintings

Provenance: Dominique-Vivant Denon Collection (his stamp partly erased in the lower right corner). Denon sale on May 1er 1826 – part of lot 329 or lot 331 Marquet de Vasselot Collection - Sale of May 28-29 1891 - lot number 157 London private collection Laurin-Guilloux-Buffetaud sale of April 4, 1974 - lot number 25 Ader-Picard-Tajan sale June 7, 1989 Gilbert Butler Gallery - New York (from a label on the back) This drawing, which bears the signature "Fr Guardi", is included in the catalog raisonné of Guardi's drawings (Guardi - I designi) published by Antonio Morassi under number 435 (reproduction number 433). In this drawing, probably executed at the end of his life, Francesco Guardi (1712-1793) depicts a partly imaginary view of the villas located along the Brenta Canal. Those villas, set along the canal that connects Venice and Padua, were one of the traditional holiday destinations of Venetian aristocratic families. The long succession of sales in which this drawing appears allows us to trace it back to its first known owner, Dominique-Vivant Denon, who certainly bought it in Italy, either during his long stay in Venice (1786-1793), possibly from Guardi himself, or during the Napoleonic period. 1. Francesco Guardi, a protean artist Francesco Guardi was born into a family of artists: his father Domenico (1678 - 1716) was also a painter, as were his two brothers Gianantonio, known as Antonio (1699 - 1760) and Nicolò. His sister Cecilia married the painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Art historians estimate that Francesco Guardi painted his first vedute around 1755-1756; the painting of vedute heralded therefore the second stage in his life as a painter, as he was in his mid-forties. His first views of Venice were painted under the influence of Canaletto, whose studio he may have attended. In 1760, as he took over the family workshop on the death of his brother, who until then had run it focusing largely on the production of religious and historical scenes, allowed him to discover and flourish in this pictorial genre. His second son Giacomo (1764 - 1835) joined him and was the last painter of the family. Until his death Francesco remained a fertile painter who painted with extreme ease and speed, and this explains the large number of canvases (over a thousand) that constitute his corpus. The themes explored by Guardi in this second part of his life are multiple but can be classified in three broad categories, which are quite permeable: beside the views of Venice, which constitute the most well-known part of his drawn and painted work, Guardi was a great illustrator of the Venetian festivals and breathed new life into to the Caprice, a pictorial genre that mixes imaginary representations of architectural landscapes, often inspired by the sites of the lagoon and scenes de genre. In its Vedute, Guardi succeeds in the tour de force of radically renewing a genre in which Canaletto had excelled. Moving away from the descriptive reality of his predecessor, he created a new, magical vision. Reversing the general tendencies of European art marked by the advent of the neo-clacissism, during the last thirty years of his life, Guardi developed a more and more personal style, gradually freeing itself from the framework of strict figuration by privileging evocations rather than representations. In his Vedute, Guardi sometimes abandons the narrow frame of the lagoon for firm ground, as in 1778 at the time of his voyage to Trentino, or when carrying out a series of paintings representing Venetian villas which were accompanied by some drawings, following the request of John Strange, the British "Resident" in Venice. 2. Description of the artwork This drawing, recognized by Antonio Morassi as an autograph work by Francesco Guardi, is a unicum in the artist's corpus. Although it may be similar to other drawings of Venetian villas commissioned by John Strange, it is likely to be a later work, mixing real and imaginary elements. At a bend of the Brenta, on the right we can see an imposing Palladian villa and on the other bank two villas separated by a sort of nymphaeum. They are isolated from the road that runs along the canal by high walls in which three monumental portals open, one of which is decorated with statues. In the middle of the canal the Burchiello advances. It was a river boat with a large wooden cabin, finely painted and decorated and lit by windows on each side. This boat was used by the wealthiest Venetians to travel from Venice to their country villas. Boats like this were rowed from St. Mark's to Fusina, from where they were then pulled by horses to Padua. The absence of horses tells us that the boat is probably on its way down the canal to Venice. In an amusing detail at the far left of the drawing, Guardi has elliptically depicted a horse-drawn carriage, pulled by a single horse that seems to be at full gallop, as if trying to catch up with the Burchiello. The villa on the right has a majestic peristyle from which a flight of steps emerges. The composition seems largely fanciful since these steps stop on a balustrade located at mid-height and do not appear to give access to the garden below. The garden is embellished with kiosks, as if for a waterside party, with a circular fountain...

A time lapse of Venice in the XVIII Century made by one of the most influencer Venetian painter of the period. The classical view of the Grand Canal is a classic masterpiece of Franc...