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Venice A Panoramic View of the Bacino di San Marco with the Doge’s Palace, Molo and the Riva degli Schiavoni / Venice: A Panoramic View of the Bacino di San Marco with San Giorgio Maggiore, the Punta di Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute, c. 1760

Francesco Guardi

Exhibited by Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings

Material Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over underdrawing in black chalk

Dimensions 46.9 x 80.0 cm (famed 47.3 x 80.2 cm)

Place of Creation Venice

Status Vetted

About the Work

These impressively large scale view by Francesco Guardi were unknown and unpublished until 2004. They count as amongst his highest graphic achievements and re possibly the largest drawings by the artist.

They are preparatory drawings for the largest known and most important pair of oil paintings by Guardi (measuring 285 x 423 cm.) which are in the Rothschild collection at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire. The works were conceived as a pair and show opposing views from the Bacino of San Marco as seen by someone arriving by sea. The paintings may have originally been intended to hang opposite each other.

The pair were drawn around 1760, a period when Guardi freed himself from the direction of his elder brother Giovanni Antonio Guardi to develop his more autonomous and loose style. Guardi uses his characteristically fluid and evocative pen work to render the vessels and seafarers in detail, and employs rapidly-applied but extremely subtle washes to endow the scene with the sparkling luminosity so unique to Venice.

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Provenance

Anonymous sale, Christie's, London, 6 July 2004, lots 87 and 87A (catalogued as Giacomo Guardi, but sold as Francesco Guardi following saleroom notices);
Private collection, Paris;
With Jean-Luc Baroni, London, 2005;
From whom acquired by a private collector.

Literature

D. Succi, Guardi. Itinerario artistico. Catalogo dei dipinti e disegni inediti, Milan 2021, cat. nos 426-27, reproduced pp. 308-09 (as Francesco Guardi).