Bernardo Bellotto (Venice 1721-1780 Warsaw)
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE COLLECTION ■9 BERNARDO BELLOTTO (VENICE 1721-1780 WARSAW) View of Verona with the Ponte delle Navi oil on canvas 52q x 92q in. (133.3 x 234.8 cm.) painted in 1745-47 £12,000,000-18,000,000 US$18,000,000-26,000,000 €14,000,000-21,000,000 PROVENANCE: LITERATURE: Anonymous sale ‘lately consigned from abroad’; Christie’s, 30 March [=2nd M. Chamot, ‘Baroque Paintings’, Country Life, LX, 6 November 1926, p. 708. day] 1771, lot 55, as 'Canaletti', 'its companion [lot 54; A large and most capital A. Oswald, ‘North Mymms Park, II’, Country Life, LXXV, 20 January 1934, picture, being a remarkable view of the city of Verona, on the banks of the pp. 70-1, fig. 13. Adige. This picture is finely coloured, the perspective, its light and shadow S. Kozakiewicz, in Bernardo Bellotto 1720-1780, Paintings and Drawings from fine and uncommonly high finish’d’; 250 guineas to Grey] exhibiting another the National Museum of Warsaw, exhibition catalogue, London, Whitechapel view of the same city, equally fine, clear and transparent’, the measurements Art Gallery, Liverpool, York and Rotterdam (catalogue in Dutch), 1957, p. 25, recorded as 53 by 90 inches (250 guineas to ‘Fleming’, ie. the following). under no. 32. Gilbert Fane Fleming (1724-1776), Marylebone; Christie’s, London, 22 May W. Schumann and S. Kozakiewicz, in Bernardo Bellotto, genannt Canaletto 1777, as ‘Canaletti. A view of the city of Verona, esteemed the chef d’œuvre of in Dresden und Warschau, exhibition catalogue, Dresden, 1963, respectively the master’ (205 guineas to ‘Ld Cadogan’, i.e. the following). under nos. 3 and 71. Charles Sloane Cadogan, 3rd Baron, from 1800 1st Earl, Cadogan (1728-1807), W. Schumann and S. Kozakiewicz, Drezno i Warswawa w twórczości Bernarda and presumably by inheritance to his son, Bellotta Canaletta, exhibition catalogue, Warsaw, Muzeum Narodowe, 1964, Charles Henry Sloane, 2nd Earl Cadogan (1749-1832). p. 58, under nos. 3 and 71. (Probably) acquired by the Hon. George James Welbore Agar Ellis, from 1831 W. Schumann and S. Kozakiewicz, Bernardo Bellotto genannt Canaletto, 1st Baron Dover (1797-1833), Dover House, Whitehall, and by inheritance exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 1965, pp. 15 and 47, under no 8. through his widow, S. Kozakiewicz, in Europäische Veduten des Bernardo Bellotto genannt Lady Georgina Dover (1804-1860), by whom lent to the British Institution in Canaletto, exhibition catalogue, Essen, Villa Hügel, 1966, pp. 19 and 99, under 1838, and apparently their daughter-in-law, no. 65. Eliza Horatia Frederica (1833-1896), widow of Henry George, 2nd Baron W.S. Lewis, ed., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, London Dover and 3rd Viscount Clifden (1825-1866), in whose name lent to the Royal and New Haven, 1967, pp. 298-9, note 10. Academy in 1877, to their son, S. Kozakiewicz, Bernardo Bellotto, genannt Canaletto, Recklinghausen, 1972, I, Henry George, 4th Viscount Clifden (1863-1895); his sale (+), Robinson & p. 45; II, pp. 80-3, no. 101, illustrated; English edition, translated by M. Whittall, Foster, London, 25 May [=5th day] 1895, lot 784, as 'Canaletto' (2,000 guineas Bernardo Bellotto, London, 1972, I, p. 44; II, pp. 80-1, no. 101. to Agnew’s for the following). E. Camesasca, L’opera completa del Bellotto, Milan, 1974, p. 95, no. 67. Walter Hays Burns (1838-1897), North Mymms Park, Hertfordshire, and by D. Sutton, in Souvenirs of the Grand Tour: A Loan Exhibition from National inheritance at North Mymms through his son, Trust Collections in Aid of the Trust’s Conservation Fund, exhibition catalogue, Walter Spencer Morgan Burns (1872-1929), to the latter’s son, London, Wildenstein, 1982, p. 22, under no. 6. Major-General Sir George Burns, K.C.V.O., G.B., D.S.O., O.B.E., M.C. (1911- St. J. Gore, in The Treasure Houses of Britain; Five Hundred Years of Private 1997); Christie’s, London, 26 November 1971, lot 30 (£300,000), when Patronage and Art Collecting, exhibition catalogue, Washington, National acquired by the present owner. Gallery of Art, 1985, p. 273, under no. 193, as ‘a strikingly original composition’. S. Marinelli, Bernardo Bellotto: Verona e le cittàeuropee, Milan, 1990, pp. 124-9. EXHIBITED: G. Marini, in Art in the Eighteenth Century: The Glory of Venice, exhibition London, British Institution, Pictures of the Italian, Spanish, Flemish, Dutch and catalogue, London, Royal Academy, and Washington, National Gallery of Art, French Masters, June 1838, no. 141, as 'Canaletto, Bridge at Verona' (lent by 1994, p. 429, under no. 255. Lady Dover). A. Laing, In Trust for the Nation: Paintings from National Trust Houses, London, London, Royal Academy, The Winter Exhibition, 1877, no. 239, as 'Canaletto, 1995, pp. 86-87, under no. 30, fig. 13. Bridge at Verona' (lent by Viscountess Clifden). E.P. Bowron and G.J.M. Weber, in Bernardo Bellotto 1722-1780, exhibition London, The Magnasco Society, at Agnew’s, Loan Exhibition of Pictures of the catalogue, Venice, Museo Correr and Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, 2001, XVII & XVIII Centuries, October 1926, no. 17. p. 142, under no. 37; English edition, Bernardo Bellotto and the Capitals of Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, on long-term loan, 1973-2021. Europe, p. 144, under no. 38. K. Załeski, in Bernardo Bellotto genannt Canaletto, Europäische Veduten, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2005, pp. 219-20, under no. 56, fig. 56.1. A. Henning, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister Dresden: Die Augestellten Werke, Cologne, 2005, I, p. 55. B.A. Kowalczyk, in Bellotto and Canaletto, Wonder and Light, exhibition catalogue, Milan, Gallerie d’Italia, 2016, p. 168, under no. 54. B.A. Kowalczyk, in Bernardo Bellotto 1740, Viaggio in Toscana, exhibition catalogue, Lucca, Fondazione Ragghianti, 2019, p. 113. 40 In addition to the hammer price, a Buyer’s Premium (plus VAT) is payable. Other taxes and/or an Artist Resale Royalty fee are also payable if the lot has a tax or λ symbol. Check Section D of the Conditions of Sale at the back of this catalogue. This justly-celebrated picture and its erstwhile companion, Verona from church of San Fermo Maggiore. To the left of this, above the sunlit span on the Isola, with the Castel San Pietro ahead; the floating wooden mills Bellotto reveals himself as an equally acute observer of the passage of the Ponte Nuova looking upstream with the Castel San Pietro (Powis of the bridge, are the houses lining the Via Dogana, and above those are on the river and the distant ridge protected by the city wall are already in time on buildings: plants are weakening the parapets and beaks of the Castle, the National Trust), are the supreme masterpieces of Bellotto’s the slender campanile of San Fermo Minore, a shorter spire, a stretch of shadow. In his other views of Verona, the appreciably smaller pair of the bridge; paint has fallen away to reveal the brick of the small structure early career. The two are Bellotto’s ultimate expressions of the clear light the battlemented medieval city wall and a small domed belfry. On the Castelvecchio with the Ponte Scaligero (Kozakiewicz, nos. 94 and 96), projecting above the central arch of the bridge, while there is a disturbing of his native Veneto, and the Ponte delle Navi is more arresting in design left the easternmost arch of the bridge crosses the Acqua Morta to the Bellotto chose intersecting viewpoints, as Canaletto often did with his crack in the wall behind this which has allowed part of the mortar to decay than any of his earlier works, and perhaps than any of those that were to Via San Paolo, the entrance to which is cast in deep shadow. The eye is pairs. In the case of this picture and that at Powis the viewpoints are back and ivy climbs up the side wall; all but one of the machicolations of the follow. Before leaving Italy, Bellotto made slightly simplified replicas of drawn down the predecessor of the Lungadige Porta Vittoria along the to back. As a result, although afternoon light was selected for obvious tower are eroded and, to the left of the central machicolation, water has both pictures. He took these to Dresden where they set the course of his left bank of the Adige. Beyond the prominent white building, the Dogana, compositional reasons in both, the pictures formed a perfect visual pair, run down the brick and discoloured this, as it has done from the ends of subsequent development in Europe. on the corner of Via San Paolo is Palazzo Pompei, a masterpiece of 1530 that at Powis lit from the left, the Ponte delle Navi from the right. the windowsills, while a number of the angle blocks have fallen away; a by the great Veronese architect Michele Sanmicheli: the artist simplified section of ashlar facing has failed above the right-hand arch of the bridge The subject: the detail of both. Further away, after a group of floating wooden mills, is This picture allowed Bellotto to express his instinctive gift for narrative itself to reveal the brick beneath. Characteristically, Bellotto tells us that the now-demolished church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, or della Vittoria in a way that the Powis composition did not. A social panorama unfolds: it had been necessary to stabilise the arch and two of the others with The view is from the southernmost house on the narrow spit of land, Nuova, a Gerolamini monastery built between 1487 and 1512, suppressed below the viewer, in the shadow cast by the building from which Bellotto irregularly-placed metal clamps. The physical condition of the bridge the Isolo, separating the river Adige, on the right, from the Acqua in 1806 and destroyed by bombing in 1945.