In the wake of Charles Beddington’s authoritative exhibition Canaletto in England (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and the Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2006-7), Dr Steven Parissien has mounted the exhibition Canaletto: Celebrating Britain which sets out to explore Canaletto’s activity in England from a different viewpoint. This exhibition is on display at Compton Verney 14 March – 7 June 2015 before transferring to the Holburne Museum, Bath (7 June – 4 October) and Abbot Hall, Kendal (22 October 2015 – 13 February 2016).

Unfortunately there is no catalogue, or checklist of exhibits available at Compton Verney, however, the accompanying publication, Celebrating Britain: Canaletto, Hogarth and Patriotism, edited by Steven Parissien, introduced with his chapter ‘Canaletto: Celebrating Britain’, with contributions by Pat Hardy, Jacqueline Riding and Oliver Cox, is of limited use in the exhibition but provides background information for the visitor and a high proportion of the exhibits feature as illustrations in it.

According to the publicity material, the selection of the exhibits and their presentation was predicated on the thesis that “The paintings and drawings which Canaletto executed in Britain between 1746 and 1755 do not just document scenes and landmarks in the manner of a traditional painter of views”. Steven Parissien postulates that “The vast majority of his works were instead specifically designed to celebrate the latest achievements of British architecture and engineering – and, by implication, the impressive accomplishment, success and wealth of the rising British nation”. Consequently great emphasis is placed on the claim that Canaletto was invited to England by Sir Hugh Smithson, later 1st Duke of Northumberland, to depict the new Westminster Bridge, of which he was a commissioner.

The exhibition opens with a section devoted to ‘Canaletto’s Venice’ which features two paintings borrowed from Manchester City Art Gallery, of the Venetian churches of San Giorgio Maggiore (1566-76) and Il Redentore (1577-92), which were designed by Andrea Palladio (1508-1580). Two related drawings lent by the Royal Collection Trust accompany them, together with the atmospheric oil painting Venice: The Punta della Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore (c.1727-30), also from the Royal Collection Trust. Palladio exercised enormous influence on British secular architecture from the time of Inigo Jones (1573-1652), but not on British church design, and these paintings have been chosen to demonstrate the British taste for Venetian vedute which developed strongly between the end of the War of Spanish Succession (Peace of Utrecht, 1713) and the spread of the War of Austrian Succession into Northern Italy (1742).

Information provided in the labels is severely limited, not least in the case of the two drawings lent from Windsor which are described as executed in “Pen and dark ink, over a little ruled and free pencil and pinpointing”. More explanation was needed here and in K.T. Parker’s catalogue, The Drawings of Antonio Canaletto in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle (1948), these two drawings (Parker 34 & 35) are catalogued as revealing “much pinpointing”. The difference in wording is critical because pricking through a drawing to transfer the key elements to facilitate the production of a second version was standard studio practice. Parker himself warned that the fact a drawing came from Consul Smith’s Collection (sold to George III, 1762-63) did not mean it was necessarily from the hand of Canaletto himself. Pinpointing implies strongly the existence of another version of a drawing, but provides no evidence that a pinpointed drawing at Windsor is necessarily the prime version. Parker drew attention to “their rather dry and mechanical execution” (op. cit., 35), but any assessment today must be left to individual connoisseurship. In the absence of a catalogue the student of Canaletto has to turn instead to earlier publications, not least Charles Beddington’s Dulwich catalogue (2006) and Canaletto & England (Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, edited by Michael Liversidge and Jane Farrington, 1993). Correlations are not always easy due to the omissions of dimensions from the captions to the illustrations in the accompanying publication, and references to the standard catalogue raisonné of Canaletto’s paintings (W.G. Constable, Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal, 1697-1768, second edition, revised by J.G.Links, 1976). The present reviewer visited the exhibition 26 March 2015 when neither Warwick Castle: The South Front, by Canaletto, nor Westminster Abbey with the Knights Companion of the Order of the Bath in Procession, 28 June 1749, were on display.
The heart of the exhibition is provided by the sections ‘Canaletto’s Britain, and, St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Bridge’. Setting aside the peculiar View of Greenwich from the River which has been on loan to the Tate Gallery since 1997, presumably for study purposes, these sections do include a number of paintings and drawings of outstanding quality. Particularly distinguished are The Grand Walk in Vauxhall and The Interior of the Rotunda at Ranelagh, both c.1751, belonging to the Compton Verney Collections Settlement and surely painted in London from studies made on the spot. Canaletto had arrived in London in 1746, and it has been generally believed that the primary reason for bringing his studio to London was that after 1742 the number of British visitors to Venice – his main customers – declined sharply, and that he chose to go to his customers, rather than vice versa. Prior to then, his output for British customers had been overwhelmingly Venetian vedute and, in consequence, it has to be assumed that he travelled to London with unsold work, and that he repeated the process in reverse on his temporary return to Venice as is indeed stated by P.A. Orlandi, Abecedario Pittorico, Venice, 1753. The inference is that Canaletto very probably painted Venetian vedute in London for those desiring them, and London views after his final return to Venice, from the studio material taken back with him, for British patrons so inclined.

Of the magnificent holdings of paintings and drawings by Canaletto in the Royal Collection today, only two – paintings – were not included in the purchase en bloc from Consul Smith. Lent by the Royal Collection Trust, the pair of impressive oil paintings, London: The Thames from Somerset House Terrace towards the City and London: the Thames from Somerset House Terrace towards Westminster, labelled as executed c. 1750-51, would appear to have formed part of the purchase of Consul Smith’s collection and are enclosed in his frames. They are unlikely to have been taken back to Venice by Canaletto, as unsold works, in 1755. In the exemplary exhibition catalogue accompanying Canaletto: Paintings & Drawings, shown at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 1980-81, the case is made for their execution in Venice after 1755, and of the former the compilers noted “Handling and drawing in paint, are very schematized”, while of the latter “the figures are notably perfunctory”. The later dating would appear to be more acceptable. Although great emphasis is placed by the organisers on the construction of Westminster Bridge (completed and opened to traffic in November 1750) no paintings by Canaletto of this subject are included, only two drawings from the Royal Collection Trust (c.1750), again revealing much pinpointing, and an earlier sheet from the British Museum, The Western Arches of Westminster Bridge London (c.1747).

The undoubted masterpiece on display is the stunning painting The Old Horse Guards from St James’s Park belonging to The Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation, which was presumably executed from studies made in the spring or summer of 1749, shortly before the Old Horse Guards building of 1663-64 was demolished. Displayed alongside is Canaletto’s smaller oil painting, The New Horse Guards from St. James’s Park, datable to c.1752-53, and the drawing closely related to the Lloyd Webber painting, lent by the British Museum. These enable one to gain insight into the working practices adopted by Canaletto at this time in his working career, with slightly different viewpoints adopted and some staffage reused. Similarly, the Dulwich Picture Gallery painting of Old Walton Bridge is arguably one of the last paintings executed by Canaletto before his definitive return to Venice in 1755, while there is a closely related, extended version in the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, depicting later alterations to the bridge and from a slightly different viewpoint, which was supplied to Samuel Dicker in 1755. The Dulwich painting is of particularly fine quality and on stylistic grounds alone there is much in Links’s suggestion that it may have been painted closer to 1750.

As the exhibition is entitled Canaletto: Celebrating Britain, and vigorously marketed as such, most visitors to Compton Verney will have arrived expecting that, and the paintings of An Arch of Westminster Bridge, by Samuel Scott (c. 1751), derived from the Canaletto compositions, and The London Riverfront from Westminster to the Adelphi, (1771-72) by William Marlow, both of which are directly inspired by Canaletto would provide an appropriate codicil. However, the exhibition continues with a further section entitled ‘Rule Britannia’ in which the theme of emerging nationalism is explored, and the exhibition concludes with William Marlow’s Capriccio: St Paul’s Cathedral and a Venetian Canal (c. 1795). This is presented as Marlow’s masterpiece, symbolising the triumph of London as the commercial powerhouse of the future, dominating crumbling Venetian palazzi. It is certainly a very uncomfortable vision, parodying Canaletto’s ‘capricci’ long after the departure of the master, but powerful evidence for the triumphant nationalism identified by Steven Parissien. When the view of Warwick Castle: The South Front arrives from the Yale Center for British Art, together with that of Westminster Abbey, the exhibition will be complete and, enjoyed with the house remodelled by Robert Adam, set in its park at Compton Verney, will give even greater visual pleasure to the visitor.

Canaletto: Celebrating Britain is at Compton Verney, Warwickshire from 14th March to 7th June 2015.

Image credit: Canaletto, ‘The New Horse Guards from St James’s Park’, c. 1752, Private Collection.