Similarly the “bad landscape” he saw in Turin is almost certainly a work by Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto’s nephew. The picture has since been re-attributed to Canaletto’s pupil Michele Marieschi. In “Notes on the Louvre”, writing about a picture of the Salute and the entrance to the Grand Canal, he said that it is “cold and utterly lifeless – truth is made contemptible” and that “boats and water he could not paint at all”. It is possible that Ruskin was sometimes writing about Canaletto pupils and assistants, when he thought he was writing about Canaletto himself. As a hugely popular artist, his work was widely forged and copied both during his lifetime and afterwards. It is, however, unclear quite how familiar the ascerbic critic was with genuine works by the Venetian. Ruskin had a particular down on Canaletto. Smith himself owned by far the largest collection of works, including 52 oil paintings and over 140 drawings, which he eventually sold to George III in 1762 for £10,000 – half the sum the latter paid the previous year for Buckingham Palace. Smith bought many Canaletto works for himself, and also helped arrange commissions from wealthy English collectors – by the late 1720s his works were already in the collections of Goodwood, Chatsworth, Woburn and of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. One of his clients was Joseph Smith, an English merchant banker who lived in Venice for 70 years, for 16 of which he was the British consul there. In the 1720s, having started his career as a theatrical scene painter, Canaletto started painting his distinctive views of Venice, frequently featuring the many major churches designed for it by Palladio. ©National Trust Images/Hamilton Kerr Inst/Chris TitmusĪlready a well established artist, his work had proved very popular with aristocratic Englishmen doing their Grand Tour of Europe.
Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal) 1697–1768Ī Self-Portrait with St Pauls in the background at Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire.
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