Regatta in Venice (c. 1770–1780) & View of the Cannaregio Canal, Venice (c. 1775–1780) – Francesco Guardi

Good evening. I am Xavier Salomon, the Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at The Frick Collection. Welcome to this evening's episode of Cocktails with a Curator. At the heart of the third floor of Frick Madison, our temporary new home, is a small area with five works that were produced in Venice in the eighteenth century. This is an area of the collection where we don't have many works, but I've already spoken about some of these. I've spoken about Tiepolo's Perseus and Andromeda, his sketch for Fresco Cycle, now lost in Milan, and I've spoken about the two beautiful pastels by Rosalba Carriera, which are a very recent acquisition for the museum. Today, instead, I would like to talk about two vedute view paintings by the Venetian eighteenth-century artist Francesco Guardi, which may come as a surprise to many visitors to the Frick but may also be old friends to other people. And you see one of the two here between Tiepolo and Rosalba Carriera. These may look familiar to some visitors to the Frick because they're usually displayed in the reading room of the Frick Art Reference Library at the Frick. And they were paintings that were acquired by Henry Clay Frick in 1913 but then given to his daughter, Helen Clay Frick, who kept them until 1984 when she donated them to the institution. And since then, they've been on display at the Frick Art Reference Library. But now at Frick Madison, we're able to show them with Tiepolo and with Rosalba Carriera. And these are two pendant views of Venice. They were painted by Francesco Guardi, who is the last great view painter of Venice. He follows, obviously, in the footsteps of other artists like Luca Carlevaris, but most famously Canaletto and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto. Guardi's life spans pretty much most of the eighteenth century. He is born in 1712 and dies in 1793. He is, of course, working, like Canaletto and Bellotto and his predecessors, for an international audience. Most of the tourists coming to Venice would like to return then home to England, France, or other places in Italy or Europe, with views of Venice. And so they would buy these works by Canaletto, Bellotto, and Guardi. While his predecessors also spent time abroad, most famously Canaletto spent some time almost a decade in England, and Bellotto traveled extensively to Central and Eastern Europe, mostly Saxony and Poland, Guardi was firmly based in Venice. You see him here in a contemporary portrait, now at the Museo Marcarezzonico in Venice. And Guardi was the son and brother of painters, and his sister, Cecilia Guardi, married Tiepolo. So he's also Tiepolo's brother-in-law. So he's firmly at the heart of the artistic world of Venice at the time. With these two viewpaintings, we're obviously going to be talking about Venice and various sites in Venice. So I am pairing this with a typical Venetian drink, which is a sgropino. A sgropino derives from the Venetian dialect word sgropin for sorbet, for lemon sorbet. And this is actually a very old drink and maybe one of the oldest cocktails that we've talked about in this series because types of sgropini and sorbetti would go all the way back to the sixteenth century in Venice. And this, of course, is a more modern take on it, which is lemon sorbet with vodka and prosecco. And, of course, you can make it as strong or as weak as you like. But this is something that is usually drunk in Venice in the summer, at the end of a meal. Sometimes people also offer it in between courses as a cleanser, which is also the way it was used in banquets. Different types of sorbets were used that way all the way from the sixteenth century onwards. Cheers. So, with Guardi's view paintings, we are in key sites in Venice. This is the first of the two, which shows the Grand Canal, of course, the main site in Venice. And here we're looking north towards the Rialto Bridge with palaces, grand aristocratic palaces, on both left and right. The occasion that this painting is representing is a regatta. And a regatta would have been a race, a competition along the canal with different types of boats. And some of them were single occupancy boats. Some had couples or groups of people, as in this case. Some of these were gondolas. Others would have been decorated in very lavish ways, as in this case. And these were called bisone. And here you get a group of people dressed in blue, matching the decoration of their boat. But as you look through the painting, you realize that there are a number of other boats with different colors. And this would have been easy, of course, as people were competing along the canal to recognize which boat was the winning boat. Here you have a pink one and a gold one. And the gold one is wonderfully decorated with this little umbrella. And the people in the boat have little triangular hats, which, of course, with the umbrella, are very much referring to Chinese fashion. The site of the canal hasn't changed very much. And here I'm comparing a detail of the painting with a photo I took only a few weeks ago. Looking up towards Rialto, and you can see just at the end in the detail and at the end of the photo on the right, half of the span of the arch of the Rialto Bridge at the end of the canal. On the left is Cabalbi, the palace of the Balbi family, which, of course, is still also on the site. But immediately to the left of the palace you notice a structure with two columns and a series of decorations. And this structure actually was built in between these two palaces. So here, again, you see on the right the Balbi Palace. On the left you see the Foscari Palace, Ca' Foscari, which is now the site of the University of Venice that was then, of course, a patrician palace. And between these two they were built, basically, on a major bend in the canal, in the Grand Canal, in an area called the Volta di Canal, the bend of the canal. And there, for the regate, a macchina would be built. And a macchina, a machine, was a temporary structure built with wood and papier-mâché where the important people witnessing the regata would sit to watch it. Of course, this being a major bend in the canal, you could look all the way, almost down to St. Mark's on one side and all the way up to the Alta on the other. But this was also where prizes were given out to the winners of the regata. Regate would take place on a number of occasions in Venice for the election of a doge, the head of state, or they would take place for the visits of important people coming to Venice or for the arrivals of ambassadors. So we don't know what the precise occasion of the regata in Guardi's painting is, but these happened on a number of occasions. And, of course, a regata storica still happens once a year, still, in Venice. Guardi is somewhat basing his painting, however, on not a specific historic event, and it's probably something that was created in his studio from imagination to a large degree. But he bases a lot of his views on views of his predecessors, on views by Canaletto. And so here you see Guardi, which was painted probably in the early 1770s, compared to Canaletto in the Royal Collection in the UK, which was painted instead in the 1730s, forty years earlier. And you can see that a lot of the view is very much the same. And this was not seen as any form of plagiarism, of copying, but, in fact, Guardi was appreciated by many patrons as a freer and different version of a view painted than Canaletto. So you see how the sky is much more dramatic and the light effects are very different from the ones in Canaletto. And, of course, the details are much more impressionistically painted than the Canaletto below. Guardi probably based some of his views on, in fact, engravings, prints after Canaletto. And here I'm showing you a print by Vicentini after the Canaletto I've just shown you. And this was probably one of the models for Guardi. And Guardi would paint these over and over again. So here I'm comparing again the Frick painting above with a painting of, effectively, the same view but with somewhat different details and a little closer to the Vicentini print, which is now in the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. The second painting in this couple shows instead the second-largest canal in Venice after the Grand Canal. And this is the Cannaregio Canal, which goes up from the Grand Canal up north towards the open lagoon and Mestre. And here you see the view on the left towards the bridge, another bridge, the bridge of the Tre Archi, of the Three Arches, and with this large palace on the right. This is along the Fondamenta of Cannaregio, the sort of pavement area along the canal. And you see some smaller houses with people putting laundry out and textiles and people walking up and down the Fondamenta below. The boats also populate this canal, but, of course, this is not the Grand Regatta. But here you have gondolas transporting people up and down the canal. You have fishermen on a small boat also fishing in the canal. And this wonderful other boat near the Fondamenta, which has been loaded with boxes and crates. And in one of the crates you can just about make out the initials of the artist, F. G. Francesco Guardi, P., of course, for Pinzi, for painting this. So the artist signs his work in this small detail. The Ponte dei Tre Archi is the main bridge on this canal. It is described as the bridge of three arches because, in fact, if you think about it, most of the bridges in Venice have only one span, one arch. And because this canal is fairly large, this bridge had three arches, which is unusual in Venice. The bridge is also the focus of another painting by Guardi that I'm showing you here in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. And here you're still seeing the Cannaregio Canal, but much closer to the bridge and without the palace on the right. This site, like the Grand Canal, hasn't changed very much. And Venice is probably one of the few cities in the world where, if you look at an eighteenth-century view and a view from today, you can almost recognize every building. And here again, you see all the way at the left the Ponte dei Tre Archi and this grand palace at the center of the view. Now, this is the palace, the so-called Ca' Surian Bellotto. And it was built in the seventeenth century for the Surian family. And the Surian family was actually a family of Armenian origins. And then at the end of the eighteenth century, it was taken over by the Bellotto family. And here is the palace today, very much like you see in the Guardi view. But when you look closely to the Guardi painting, you realize that there is a large coat of arms over the door of the palace and you see a group of people very richly dressed in livery welcoming someone into the palace. And this is because in the eighteenth century, Palazzo Surian Bellotto was the French embassy in Venice. And so what the painting is showing is probably the arrival of an important person, a guest of the ambassador or a guest of the French government, someone arriving from France in Venice. And it shows this specific event at the embassy. The embassy is also known, and curiously so, for having been the place where for just about a year, between 1743 and 1744, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great Swiss philosopher, worked as a secretary of the French ambassador in Venice. So we can think of Rousseau living in the Palazzo Surian Bellotto. But this idea of embassies and ambassadors is something that appears in Venice on a number of times and has been the focus of books and exhibitions. Here I'm showing you a great, wonderful, very large Canaletto painting in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, which shows the arrival of the French ambassador at the Ducal Palace, at the main seat of government, as the ambassador will be presented to the head of state. And this is the arrival of the French ambassador in Russia. Canaletto painted another version of the painting, almost identical with some differences, which instead shows the arrival of the imperial ambassador, and that is now in the Crispi Collection in Milan, in Italy. And so these views with embassies and ambassadors being represented in it, of course, made sense for foreign visitors coming to Venice and wanting to acquire views of this kind. The two paintings at the Frick are further linked to ambassadors because even though it would make sense to imagine that they were painted for the French ambassador, they were in fact painted for the British ambassador in Venice, who was known at the time as the resident, the British resident in Venice. And this is a man called John Strange. John Strange was ambassador in Venice from 1773 to 1788, so for more than a decade he was based in Venice. And he was a great scholar, an archaeologist, a literary figure, a great patron of the arts. And he became one of the great patrons of Guardi. So he actually collected a large group of Guardi views, some of which he acquired from Guardi. So we don't know if the two Frick views of the regatta and the French embassy were paintings that Guardi had painted in the early 1770s and that Strange acquired from him or if they were commissioned by Strange. But there are definitely other paintings, including these two views of a villa, which were commissioned from Strange. And these two paintings show the same building, the Villa Loredan in Paese. And Paese was a small town outside of Venice, on the mainland. And the villa of the Loredan family was rented in these years to John Strange and his wife. And that was their, let's say, weekend summer residence where they spent time outside of Venice. And so Guardi goes there with them and he paints the villa from the front and the back. The one above is now in a private collection. The one below is at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. And you can see that in the one below there is a little figure in a red cloak drawing on a park bench. And that figure is probably Guardi himself drawing the villa and sketching the site. And there are a number of drawings for these views. So it is clear that Guardi first drew the site, being in Paese, presumably with the Strangers, and then painted the two canvases for Strange subsequently. In 1788, Strange returns to London, to the UK, and he dies in the UK. And his wife, Sarah, had actually died in the 1780s in Venice, in 1783. And the couple didn't have any children. So Strange leaves instructions that his entire collection should be dispersed. And over a number of sales at Christie's and in a number of other places and through some donations, the whole of Strange's collection is dispersed. His collection of archaeological artifacts, of paintings and works of art, of drawings and prints and books, also his collection of natural curiosities. And some of these ended up at the time in a number of public institutions, others were acquired by private collectors. And so the two Guardis, through a number of British collections, then were acquired by Frick in 1913 through Knoedler. So I hope that when you come to Frick Madison you look at these two wonderful, small views of Venice. Of course, the Frick doesn't have any grand paintings by Canaletto or Bellotto. When Frick was acquiring works of art, those were very much not the fashion of the time. So it is actually quite interesting that Frick did buy these two small Guardis and the small Tiepolo, which were very much a curiosity for collectors in the very early twentieth century in the U.S. But, of course, we're very happy to have them on view. And I hope that with this episode I've managed to transport you into eighteenth-century Venice, albeit briefly. And I hope you're all enjoying your Sgroppino. Cheers, and see you all next time.