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Lot Essay
This distinguished Capriccio by Canaletto, while published in the past, has not been available to students of the artist for half a century. Restrained in palette, it draws both on Canaletto’s love of the buildings of Venice and on his interest in architecture that he acquired at the outset of his career when working as an assistant to his father, Bernardo Canal, an accomplished decorator for the stage.
Despite Canaletto’s long commercial success as a vedutista he must always have been aware that, in contemporary opinion, view painting ranked low in the artistic hierarchy. It must have been galling for him when so many younger painters who he must have known were inferior to him secured election to the prestigious Accademia di Pittura e Scultura decades before he did so at the age of nearly sixty-six on 11 September 1763. He knew what was expected of him and presented the Accademia with the celebrated and much copied vertical capriccio (Constable, op. cit., 1976, no. 509), which remains the outstanding example of his work in Venice. Canaletto must have seen the designing of capricci as an escape from mere topography and Consul Smith’s commission for a significant series depicting celebrated monuments in imaginary settings was no doubt a stimulating challenge. In London, Canaletto painted imaginary compositions for a number of patrons, including the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Chesterfield, and he must have seen these as a way of enlarging his repertoire. This canvas, so original in the conception of the elliptical church yet so Venetian in character, was evidently intended to demonstrate his powers of invention. In this canvas, a small sailing boast is drawn up beside a ramshackle building with an open arch—anticipating the theme of numerous small capricci by Guardi; to the right in the distance is the elegant campanile of Santo Stefano at Venice, and then, in the centre of the composition, an ambitious oval classical church with tall paired windows and a gothic tower, its top in decay, annexed to a handsome house of three floors; to the right of this is a characteristic Venetian house and beyond two shops with tenements above. Steadman (op. cit.) observed that the houses at either side of the composition derive from the sketches made with the aid of a camera in the Venice quaderno for an apparently unrealised view of San Simone Piccolo and that the form of the church in this picture echoes that of his sketch of San Simone (Constable, nos. C.52v, 53r, 53v and 54r). The diagonal line of the side of the pavement serves to define spatial recession. The picture is remarkable for the restraint of both tone and palette: the colours of the costumes of the figures echo the pale sky and the creamy render of the buildings, a few discrete touches of red apart. Canaletto was evidently intrigued by circular or oval churches. A picture at Worcester (Constable, no. 508) shows a larger rotunda with a dome inspired by that of the Pantheon; while one of the trio of capricci supplied for Norfolk House (Constable, no. 507) shows a circular, or perhaps oval, church with an ogival portico and a high façade, the former with paired colonnettes deriving from the façade of Saint Mark’s, which are similar to the engaged pairs at the corners of the tower in the picture under discussion. In this case, as with Bellotto's etching Capriccio with a domed church, based on a drawing at Darmstadt, the dome is crowned by what can only have been intended as an oculus, inspired no doubt by that of the Pantheon. The refinement of this picture, as shown for example in the treatment of the tiles of the building on the extreme right, as well as the fact that it is on a red, as opposed to a grey ground, implies that it antedated the Norfolk House picture, and Charles Beddington considers that it is of about 1742. He also observes that some of the figures reflect those of Canaletto’s nephew, Bernardo Bellotto.
A note on the provenance:
The first recorded owner of this picture was Mary, Lady Carbery, who consigned a substantial number of Old Masters and family portraits, which were stated to be being sold ‘owing to Castle Freke, Co. Cork being disposed of’. The second daughter of Henry Toulamin, she married Algernon Evans-Freke, 9th Baron Carbery of Castle Freke, County Cork, in 1890. Their son John, born in 1892, succeeded to the peerage on his father’s death in 1898. Lady Carbery, herself an accomplished author with a deep interest in and understanding of Irish traditions, subsequently married her neighbour, Dr Arthur Wellesley Sandford in 1902, but - as was not unusual in her generation – she continued to use her first husband’s title. It is not clear how the picture, then given to Bellotto, had reached Castle Freke and no member of the Evans or Freke families is known to have made the Grand Tour: rather remarkably, despite the very considerable number of his English patrons, Canaletto, unlike say Batoni or Vernet, is not known to have received any commissions from Anglo-Irishmen in Italy, apart from Ralph Howard, 1st Earl of Wicklow. Moreover, Castle Freke was gravely damaged by fire in 1910, but, as the sale catalogue established, a substantial number of pictures were salvaged and installed in the house that was rebuilt on its original footprint. The auctioneer’s book shows that an unsuccessful bid was made for the picture by Mrs Somerset Maugham, the decorator Siri Maugham who was married to the writer. The picture was subsequently to be owned by Henry Fonda, whose wife Baroness Afdera Franchetti was the niece of the creator of the Ca’ d’Oro Museum in Venice.
Despite Canaletto’s long commercial success as a vedutista he must always have been aware that, in contemporary opinion, view painting ranked low in the artistic hierarchy. It must have been galling for him when so many younger painters who he must have known were inferior to him secured election to the prestigious Accademia di Pittura e Scultura decades before he did so at the age of nearly sixty-six on 11 September 1763. He knew what was expected of him and presented the Accademia with the celebrated and much copied vertical capriccio (Constable, op. cit., 1976, no. 509), which remains the outstanding example of his work in Venice. Canaletto must have seen the designing of capricci as an escape from mere topography and Consul Smith’s commission for a significant series depicting celebrated monuments in imaginary settings was no doubt a stimulating challenge. In London, Canaletto painted imaginary compositions for a number of patrons, including the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Chesterfield, and he must have seen these as a way of enlarging his repertoire. This canvas, so original in the conception of the elliptical church yet so Venetian in character, was evidently intended to demonstrate his powers of invention. In this canvas, a small sailing boast is drawn up beside a ramshackle building with an open arch—anticipating the theme of numerous small capricci by Guardi; to the right in the distance is the elegant campanile of Santo Stefano at Venice, and then, in the centre of the composition, an ambitious oval classical church with tall paired windows and a gothic tower, its top in decay, annexed to a handsome house of three floors; to the right of this is a characteristic Venetian house and beyond two shops with tenements above. Steadman (op. cit.) observed that the houses at either side of the composition derive from the sketches made with the aid of a camera in the Venice quaderno for an apparently unrealised view of San Simone Piccolo and that the form of the church in this picture echoes that of his sketch of San Simone (Constable, nos. C.52v, 53r, 53v and 54r). The diagonal line of the side of the pavement serves to define spatial recession. The picture is remarkable for the restraint of both tone and palette: the colours of the costumes of the figures echo the pale sky and the creamy render of the buildings, a few discrete touches of red apart. Canaletto was evidently intrigued by circular or oval churches. A picture at Worcester (Constable, no. 508) shows a larger rotunda with a dome inspired by that of the Pantheon; while one of the trio of capricci supplied for Norfolk House (Constable, no. 507) shows a circular, or perhaps oval, church with an ogival portico and a high façade, the former with paired colonnettes deriving from the façade of Saint Mark’s, which are similar to the engaged pairs at the corners of the tower in the picture under discussion. In this case, as with Bellotto's etching Capriccio with a domed church, based on a drawing at Darmstadt, the dome is crowned by what can only have been intended as an oculus, inspired no doubt by that of the Pantheon. The refinement of this picture, as shown for example in the treatment of the tiles of the building on the extreme right, as well as the fact that it is on a red, as opposed to a grey ground, implies that it antedated the Norfolk House picture, and Charles Beddington considers that it is of about 1742. He also observes that some of the figures reflect those of Canaletto’s nephew, Bernardo Bellotto.
A note on the provenance:
The first recorded owner of this picture was Mary, Lady Carbery, who consigned a substantial number of Old Masters and family portraits, which were stated to be being sold ‘owing to Castle Freke, Co. Cork being disposed of’. The second daughter of Henry Toulamin, she married Algernon Evans-Freke, 9th Baron Carbery of Castle Freke, County Cork, in 1890. Their son John, born in 1892, succeeded to the peerage on his father’s death in 1898. Lady Carbery, herself an accomplished author with a deep interest in and understanding of Irish traditions, subsequently married her neighbour, Dr Arthur Wellesley Sandford in 1902, but - as was not unusual in her generation – she continued to use her first husband’s title. It is not clear how the picture, then given to Bellotto, had reached Castle Freke and no member of the Evans or Freke families is known to have made the Grand Tour: rather remarkably, despite the very considerable number of his English patrons, Canaletto, unlike say Batoni or Vernet, is not known to have received any commissions from Anglo-Irishmen in Italy, apart from Ralph Howard, 1st Earl of Wicklow. Moreover, Castle Freke was gravely damaged by fire in 1910, but, as the sale catalogue established, a substantial number of pictures were salvaged and installed in the house that was rebuilt on its original footprint. The auctioneer’s book shows that an unsuccessful bid was made for the picture by Mrs Somerset Maugham, the decorator Siri Maugham who was married to the writer. The picture was subsequently to be owned by Henry Fonda, whose wife Baroness Afdera Franchetti was the niece of the creator of the Ca’ d’Oro Museum in Venice.