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Lot Essay
This rediscovered canvas, with its restrained palette and typical touches of virtuosity, dates to the artist's maturity and shows one of the most celebrated sites of Venice, the Piazzetta. It is flanked by two of the great secular buildings of Venice, the medieval Doge’s Palace on the left and Sansovino’s Libreria on the right, with the Molo, and, across the Bacino, the façade of Palladio’s great church of San Giorgio Maggiore. Inevitably it was a subject for which there was a considerable demand. Morassi lists no fewer than twenty-eight variants of the Piazzetta seen from a roughly central viewpoint (A. Morassi, Guardi, I dipinti, Venice, 1975, nos. 361-388).
The painting once formed part of the collection of George Augustus Frederick Cavendish-Bentinck, M.P., who served as Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Trade in 1874-5 and Judge Advocate General from 1875 to 1880 under Benjamin Disraeli. Both in the early 1870s and after William Ewart Gladstone’s return to office in 1880, Cavendish-Bentinck travelled throughout Europe and developed a particular passion for the city of Venice and Venetian art, both of the Renaissance and the settecento. While some of his pictures were purchased from major British collections, he also made extensive acquisitions in Italy. His collection was divided between his London house at 3 Grafton Street and Brownsea Castle, itself if not on a lagoon then in the middle of Poole Harbour. The Grafton Street house was bought at a moment of financial crisis by his son-in-law, Arthur James, who purchased many lots in the posthumous Christie’s sale of 1891, in which the present lot was sold. The collection included other fine vedute, including additional works by Guardi, such as the Entrance to the Grand Canal, sold in these Rooms, 11 December 2002, lot 123 (Morassi, op. cit., I, no. 478; II, fig. 481), and Canaletto, among them the pair sold Sotheby’s, New York, 1 February 2018, lot 54.
The painting once formed part of the collection of George Augustus Frederick Cavendish-Bentinck, M.P., who served as Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Trade in 1874-5 and Judge Advocate General from 1875 to 1880 under Benjamin Disraeli. Both in the early 1870s and after William Ewart Gladstone’s return to office in 1880, Cavendish-Bentinck travelled throughout Europe and developed a particular passion for the city of Venice and Venetian art, both of the Renaissance and the settecento. While some of his pictures were purchased from major British collections, he also made extensive acquisitions in Italy. His collection was divided between his London house at 3 Grafton Street and Brownsea Castle, itself if not on a lagoon then in the middle of Poole Harbour. The Grafton Street house was bought at a moment of financial crisis by his son-in-law, Arthur James, who purchased many lots in the posthumous Christie’s sale of 1891, in which the present lot was sold. The collection included other fine vedute, including additional works by Guardi, such as the Entrance to the Grand Canal, sold in these Rooms, 11 December 2002, lot 123 (Morassi, op. cit., I, no. 478; II, fig. 481), and Canaletto, among them the pair sold Sotheby’s, New York, 1 February 2018, lot 54.