Spectators watching an acrobat

Given to Canaletto by James Byam Shaw, the present sheet belongs to a group of drawings which are all numbered and thus were probably part of one or more albums. Many of these sheets came with the inscription 'volta' (turn over), supporting this theory. The varying size of the sheets would imply the existence of several albums. The handwriting is universally accepted as Canaletto's. Five of these sheets are recorded by Constable and Links, two in Berlin, nos. 540, 837, one in Rotterdam, no. 838, one in the Courtauld Institute, no. 839, and one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, no. 940. The present large sheet is however stylistically closer to four all others of the same size that these have been allocated one number (840) by Constable and Links; the five drawings are distinguished only by asterisks, one to five. As early as 1973, Teresio Pignatti, at the suggestion of Larissa Salmina Haskell, raised the question whether one of these sheets, that in a private collection in Prato, no. 840***, might be by Canaletto's nephew Bernardo Bellotto, drawn when the latter worked in his late teens at his uncle's studio, T. Pignatti, 'Venetian Drawings of the Eighteenth Century', Master Drawings, 1973, IX, pp. 181-3. A drawing traditionally given to Canaletto formerly in the Hodgson collection was sold at Sotheby's, new York, 26 January 2000, which was only through Constable and Links through its recto. Recently taken off its mount, the verso revealed a drawing in the same hand as that of the group mentioned above. This revived the debate of the two artist's close collaboration between the years 1738 and 1743. Bellotto's extraordinary precocity was such that it is often difficult to separate the two hands. These sheets, which were not intended to leave the studio, were executed in the great Venetian studio tradition to create a stock of figures to animate the view paintings produced there. Charles Beddington is inclined to regard these sheets as by Bellotto.