Lot Essay
Painted in the spring of 1826, only two years before Bonington’s early death aged twenty-five, this dazzling view of the Ponte Rialto belongs to the small group of celebrated en plein air oil sketches of Venice, widely considered to be among the artist’s greatest achievements. Displaying his virtuoso manipulation of the brush, and the subtle observation of light and atmosphere he had mastered as a watercolourist, the picture is an outstanding example of Bonington's work, of a kind that has long captivated artists and collectors and led the American novelist Edith Wharton to proclaim Bonington as ‘the Keats of painting’ (R.W.B. Lewis and N. Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton, London, 1988, p. 203). One of only eight recorded oils on millboard executed during Bonington’s stay in Venice - all of which were retained by the artist and sold in his posthumous studio sales - this is one of only three from the series to remain in private hands.
In this late afternoon scene on the Grand Canal, Bonington captures the transient effects of light and the fading grandeur of Venice’s palazzi. At the centre, the Rialto bridge, built by Antonio da Ponte between 1589-91 and standing at the commercial heart of Venice, had been one of the most commonly painted monuments in the eighteenth-century; Canaletto, Michele Marieschi and Francesco Guardi all depicted the bridge numerous times from both the west and east. As Patrick Noon observes (op. cit., 2008), Bonington had himself made studies of the Rialto from almost every possible angle and distance, including views taken from the same spot, in both watercolour and graphite (Winchester, Virginia, Museum of the Shenandoah Valley; and London, Tate Britain; fig. 1). The present view is taken from the Riva del Vin on the left bank of the Grand Canal, allowing a wider view of the Riva del Fero on the right. Beyond the bridge, stands the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, previously home to Venice’s German merchants and where, famously, Giorgione and Titian executed their murals for the palazzo’s façade. The great expanse of sky, which dominates the upper half of the composition, is punctuated with only a few vertical accents in the form of the boats’ masts and, most prominently, the campanile of San Bartolomeo, designed by Giovanni Scalfarotto and built between 1747-54. It was for San Bartolomeo, the church of the German community in Venice, that Dürer painted his masterpiece The Feast of the Rosary (1506; Prague, Národní galerie), and where Sebastiano del Piombo executed, in circa 1510-11, his remarkable series of canvases for the organ shutters, now housed in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
It is in these eight en plein air oil studies on millboard that Bonington’s instinctive and lyrical approach to landscape painting is arguably best exhibited. Here, the artist captures this scene on the Grand Canal with consummate brio; lavishly impastoed passages of lead white are used to describe the sweeping sky and tops of palazzi caught in late-afternoon sunlight, while thinly applied horizontal bands of colour and exposed ground convey the patterns of shifting light on the water below. As is typical of his on-site Venetian oil sketches, Bonington delights in the rendering of incidental details, such as the female figure on the extreme left of the composition, whose white headdress provides a striking accent against the shadow cast across the façades of the buildings along the Riva del Vin. This eye for local sartorial detail and his evident interest in the depiction of small shipping boats were first developed in Bonington's earlier landscapes painted on the coast of Northern France, the most ambitious of which, A Fishmarket near Boulogne (1824; New Haven, Yale Center for British Art; fig. 2), arguably stands as the artist's outstanding masterpiece from the period.
Remarkably, it is thought that Bonington had not started to paint in oil until late in 1823 and yet, in August of the following year, he exhibited four landscapes in that medium at the Paris Salon. The pictures from the British School shown in 1824, which included Constable’s Haywain (London, National Gallery) - the winner of the Gold Medal - caused a sensation whilst receiving vituperative criticism from the artistically conservative quarters of the French press, who were outraged by the broad and loose handling employed for the exhibited landscapes. Bonington rapidly attained a cult status amongst French artists and connoisseurs who found in his work a freedom and naturalism that was in striking contrast to the academic classicism of the national school.
This admiration is perhaps most eloquently expressed by Eugène Delacroix, with whom Bonington shared a studio in Paris from the autumn of 1825 to early 1826. In a letter to the critic Théophile Thoré, the French painter wrote: ‘I could never cease to admire his marvellous grasp of effects and the facility of his execution […], not that he was easily satisfied. On the contrary, he frequently repainted entire passages which seemed wonderful to us; but his ability was such that his brush instantly recovered new effects as charming as the first’. Delacroix went on to praise the artist’s lightness of touch which ‘makes his pictures, as it were, like diamonds that ravish the eye, quite independently of their subject or of any representational qualities’ (translation of letter to Théophile Thoré, 30 November 1861, Correspondence générale d’Eugène Delacroix, IV, ed. André Joubin, Paris, 1935-8, p. 286).
On the 4th April 1826, Bonington left Paris for Italy with his friend and patron Baron Charles Rivet (1800-1872), stopping briefly at Milan, from where Rivet wrote that his companion ‘thinks only of Venice’. After a short stay in Verona, they arrived in the Republic. There, while lodging at the Albergo Grande Reale, now known as the Danieli – where such illustrious former residents included Goethe and Byron, and where Dickens and Proust would subsequently reside – Bonington worked feverishly for four weeks, producing sketches of the Gothic palaces along the Grand Canal and the Basilica of San Marco. In his account of their daily routine, Rivet wrote:
'We eat early, I with my chocolate and my companion with his favourite tea. Then we go out with our colour boxes, and sketchbooks. When time allows, we make [oil] studies after nature, on the Grand Canal, at the Rialto…'.
That Bonington’s fame and success were already well advanced by 1826 is attested to by Rivet in a letter to the latter’s parents (dated 10 May 1826), in which he writes of his fellow artist: ‘he finds himself at the head of a capital sum of 7 to 8 thousand francs, gained since the month of January’. As Patrick Noon observes (op. cit.), this is a considerable sum for an easel and watercolour painter when compared to the six thousand francs, or £150, paid by the French government only a few months earlier for Géricault’s monumental Raft of the Medusa (1818-19; Paris, Musée du Louvre).
Although some of his Venetian oils were worked on later, after Bonington returned to his studio in Paris, many were probably intended, and kept, as studies for finished exhibition pieces. A drawing by Thomas Shotter Boys, now in the British Museum, London, entitled The Interior of Bonington’s Studio, no. 11 Rue de Martyrs (1827; fig. 3), shows two such works; a large unframed canvas of the Palazzo Ducale on one easel, and, leaning against another, a framed view of the Grand Canal. Both pictures shown in Boys' evocative drawing are likely to have been subsequently owned by James Carpenter (1768-1852), the prominent bookseller and art collector; that on the raised easel is presumably The Ducal Palace, Venice, with a religious procession (London, Tate Britain; fig. 4). The latter, showing the artist’s celebrated Entrance to the Grand Canal, with Santa Maria della Salute, commissioned by Carpenter and once the artist’s most famous view of the city, was exhibited to considerable acclaim, both at the Paris Salon in 1827 and the Royal Academy the following year (1827; Private collection; Noon, op. cit., 2008, no. 226). Delécluze, the notoriously conservative champion of the French neo-classical school, who had been the most vociferous critic of the British School at the 1824 Salon, was enthralled by Bonington’s work in the Paris exhibition: ‘…one discovers with extreme pleasure two Venetian views painted by Bonington. These pictures are tout-à-fait remarkable’.
The exhibition of his Venetian canvases at the Paris Salon in 1827 and Royal Academy in 1828 resulted in a deluge of commissions for views of the city from French and English patrons, including Sir Robert Peel, Sir Thomas Lawrence, then President of the Royal Academy, and Louis-Joseph-Auguste Coutan. Coutan, a Parisian manufacturer and wholesaler of fabrics, formed an astonishing collection for his house in the Place Vendôme, that included Constable’s View of the Stour, near Dedham (1822; San Marino, The Huntington), then the most celebrated landscape painting in France. He owned eight watercolours and three oils by Bonington, including The Ducal Palace, Venice, from the Riva degli Schiavoni, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. The strain of work rapidly took its toll on the young artist and, after an illness brought on by sunstroke or nervous exhaustion while sketching, his health rapidly deteriorated. On the 23 September 1828, a month short of his twenty-sixth birthday, Bonington died of tuberculosis.