For most of the young lords gadding about Europe on their Grand Tours in the 18th century, stop-offs in Paris, Turin and Rome – perhaps Dresden and Geneva for the dedicated – would do. Not Lord John Russell: in 1729, the 19-year-old future Duke of Bedford wrote a hit-list in his pocketbook of a staggering 85 destinations throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The trip’s non-abstemious vein continued when Lord John reached Venice, at some point in 1731, and commissioned 24 views of the city from the leading topographical painter of the day, Canaletto. It is thought to be Canaletto’s largest single commission and receipts in a reverent new exhibition of these paintings at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, show that Lord John paid at least £188 for the set – more than five times the sum a skilled tradesman could earn in a year.
Canaletto’s Venice Revisited, which also includes the young aristocrat’s pocketbook and annotated guidebook, is a significant outing for the paintings, because ever since Canaletto rolled up the finished canvases, they have hung in the dining room at Woburn Abbey, the Duke of Bedford’s ancestral seat. A portion of the full set, which took the painter nine years, was presented at the Holburne Museum in Bath last year, but the NMM exhibition is the first time that they have all been displayed together beyond Woburn’s walls.
Canaletto, real name Giovanni Antonio Canal, was Venetian born and bred, and his familiarity with the city’s fabric beams from every painting. He started out creating theatrical scenery, but it was his crisply rendered topographical views, or vedute paintings, that granted him international renown. This was particularly true in Britain, the patricians of which sent their deep-pocketed, souvenir-seeking sons Canaletto’s way – until the Napoleonic Wars stopped play.
The exhibition begins with one of two larger paintings in the Woburn set, A Regatta in the Grand Canal (1740). It’s Canaletto at his most peacockish, with every façade minutely rendered, and tiny details to engage, absorb or amuse in every square inch: boats tip, people gesticulate, hangings billow, water laps.
