How is this painting like an early Beatles' gig. Canaletto’s 'Stonemason’s Yard' - National Gallery

It is my pleasure to talk today about this painting, Canaletto's The Stone Mason's Yard of about 1725. My pitch to you today is that this painting is like an early Beatles concert. It's like being in a smoky grotty little club somewhere in Liverpool in the 1960s. This painting is painted just at the moment that Canaletto is becoming Canaletto. It is considered his early masterpiece. But this is not a typical Canaletto. We don't see the great sweep of the Venetian lagoon here. We don't see the grand canal full of wealthy people dressed up for carnival. We don't see gondolas racing up the waterways. What we're looking at is a really ordinary scene of Venetian life. We're looking at the Campo San Vidal, a square in Venice that's been turned into a worker's yard. And there are blocks of stone and tools all over the place, and people doing ordinary things. Actually, the thing that always catches my eye is this woman in the foreground, the mother who's, you know, either running after or she may be telling off this child who's tumbled over. And at the far right, at her window on her little balcony, we have a woman with a spindle holding it up as if to the light as if she's just about to start her day. It's funny, you know, the painting is called, has been called for a very long time, The Stone Mason's Yard, which actually makes it sound very masculine. It sounds like a place where you see lots of men at work. And in fact, for me, it's the four female figures we see in the foreground who really plot our visual journey across this canvas. You know, there's the woman leaning out of the window, the woman tending to her children, the woman drawing water, that woman at the window looking out with her spindle. It's their domestic, very ordinary, very day-to-day activities that actually we're looking at. The Stone Mason's Yard was the first painting by Canaletto to enter the National Gallery's collection. It came to us in the collection of Sir George Beaumont, who was himself a landscape painter and a collector and a great advocate for art in this country. He left a very important group of paintings to the nation, which come to us in 1828, just a few years after we're founded. And you'd think that would mean that we would know a lot about this picture, being the first Canaletto being from such an important collection. But actually, we don't. We don't know exactly when this picture is painted. We don't know who it's painted for. The suspicion has been that it's perhaps for a Venetian patron, that's to say someone who's based in Venice, so someone for whom these everyday qualities of Venetian life would appeal. Because as he becomes more and more famous throughout the 1730s and 1740s, Canaletto becomes synonymous with Venice, not just for Venetians, but actually across Europe. This, of course, is the age of the Grand Tour. So we have wealthy aristocrats from across Europe, but particularly from Britain, traveling across Europe, traveling to Venice. And owning a Canaletto, bringing back one of these views of Venice becomes an essential souvenir. It's something that not only proves you've been to Venice, but proves your taste and your erudition and the fact that you've not only gone to these sites, but you've been able to bring back your memento from them. And most of those Grand Tourists, they did choose those very grand scenes. And we can see that in our collection here at the National Gallery. So we have two versions of the same regatta composition. That tells us that this is an incredibly popular composition. It tells us it's so popular that Canaletto painted it many times, because we do consider both of these to be by Canaletto's hand. We also have two versions of a scene set on the upper reaches of the Grand Canal, one that we believe to be by one of Canaletto's studio assistants, and one by his nephew, Bernardo Bellotto, who he trains with him to work in his studio. So that tells us that Canaletto, we know that he has a big studio of people helping him, but also that there's demand for many, many versions of his paintings. But the Stonemason's Yard is unique. To me it feels like almost like a secret Canaletto, or a Canaletto in which you get a glimpse of a secret Venice, one that you only really find in this particular picture. And if you look closely, there are little details here in the Stonemason's Yard that do appear in those later, grander, more kind of characteristic paintings. So the crumbling brickwork that we see here in the Stonemason's Yard, we find that again in a painting like the view of the upper reaches of the Grand Canal with San Simeone Piccolo. We see that same attention to texture and the buildings and the fabric of the Venetian city. The row of plants that we see here on the balcony at the right of the Stonemason's Yard, we get a little glimpse of that kind of balcony culture again in the feast day of San Roc, just a little detail up in the corner, but one of those ones that makes Canaletto's paintings feel like Venice, to make it feel like a real city. To me this is what makes the Stonemason's Yard the perfect Canaletto to spend time with. It's a painting in which we can see where he's come from, we can see his city, we can see his early kind of interpretations of that built environment, but we can also see where he's going. We get those amazing hints of what his paintings will become. So we have all of that wrapped up in this picture but it's also just a wonderful painting to come back to again and again. You can spend as much time as you like with this picture and I promise you there is always some new detail to delight you.