With the phenomenon of the Grand Tour something of perennial interest to both Keith McCullar and me, we were eager to visit the exhibition ‘Canaletto and his rivals’ at the National Gallery. For all the English milordi fortunate enough, and their were many, to further the worldly education thought necessary for those who were the inheritors of the mantle of not only civility but civilization, following the de rigueur stay in Rome required to absorb what one could of the classical world, the ultimate goal, then, was Venice. The Las Vegas of its day, Venetian view painters daubed busily to render the views of Venice that were then sent to England as pleasant reminders of what were in most cases memorable visits. Reminders that could, of course, be displayed in polite company.
The exhibition was noteworthy as it was curated not by a museum professional but by the dealer in view paintings, Charles Beddington. The exhibition itself was not large, and featured, as the name implies, works not only by Canaletto, but also by his contemporaries and students- Marieschi, Bellotto, and Guardi. As well, the exhibition featured works that predated Canaletto’s preeminence- Vanvitelli and Carlevarijs most prominently- giving us some artistic and commercial context from which Canaletto emerged as a major figure.
Although a number of the paintings were pictures we were already familiar with, it was none the less pleasant to see them all grouped together. Sadly, though, the exhibition and the catalog provided no new scholarship, and, in fact, mostly consisted of a rather trite formal comparison of the work of one artist to another, using Canaletto as something of a benchmark. What would certainly have added interest to the exhibition would have been, at the very least a discussion of the pigments that made view paintings look the way they do. Venice’s long history as a port made it a bonanza for artists and their colormen, with imports of rare, expensive and unusual pigments typically available in a broader array than perhaps anywhere else in Europe. Further, it is hard for me to imagine that an exhibition limited solely to 18th century view paintings could be complete without a discussion of Prussian blue. The first synthesized pigment, it solved a centuries old problem for artists- an inexpensive blue that was also non-fugitive. The expansive skies of Canaletto’s, and all his contemporaries, probably are in no small part influenced by the ability to conveniently use Prussian blue to achieve them.
Interestingly, Brian Sewell, the long time art critic of the London Evening Standard was likewise disappointed at the level of scholarship. But Sewell was more than anything alarmed that the National Gallery in London, where the exhibition originated, should have allowed a dealer whose stock in trade are Venetian view paintings, to mount such an exhibition. Heretofore, I would generally argue that a dealer is a great person to curate an exhibition anywhere, as dealers not unusually have a greater knowledge base than many academics and museum professionals. The reason for this, in general terms, is that dealers, whose own academic backgrounds often match those whose sole profession is scholarship, have the advantage of seeing many, many more objects. A museum professional’s particular familiarity with his own institution’s collection often leads to a type of tunnel vision. The dealer, on the other hand, will perforce have the opportunity to see and examine a much broader range of material at auctions and in private collections access to which academics or museum professionals might not be privy. What alarms Brian Sewell is that the Canaletto exhibition seems to have an overarching commercial imperative, with the associated catalog with its dearth of scholarship more on the order of what one might expect in a selling exhibition.
Unfortunately, in this Sewell and I agree.