Canaletto is the undoubted star of a new exhibition

THINK Venice and you might think of canals, gondolas, the Rialto Bridge, St Mark’s Square and countless crumbling and beautiful palazzi. You might also think of art, and Canaletto in particular, the 18th-century painter who immortalised Venice, a painter to a European aristocracy whose well-heeled sons and daughters trod the well-worn path of the Grand Tour, always on the lookout for a suitably impressive memento of their cultural journey.

“Canaletto has become so well known in this country that when we go to Venice today, we see it through his eyes – and in his time, the Grand Tourists did too,” says Lucy Whitaker, senior curator of paintings at the Royal Collection, who has worked on a new exhibition exploiting the collection’s superb 18th-century holdings, Canaletto and the Art of Venice, which opens at the Queen’s Gallery at the Palace of Holyroodhouse this week, the largest exhibition of Canaletto in Scotland to date.

“But the Venetians weren’t interested in buying Canaletto,” says Whitaker. “He was regarded in Venice like everyone who was a view painter – as the lowest in status. Religious and history painters were at the top, the portrait and landscape artists, then view painters, who were only believed to paint what they saw.”

That view was so pervasive, indeed, that Venice itself did not own any Canalettos in its public collections until the 1980s.

The Royal Collection has the largest number of works by Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto) in the world: 53 paintings, 142 drawings and 46 prints. And it is all down to two men – Joseph Smith, an English consul, merchant, banker and art collector, who lived in Venice for his entire life, and King George III, both of whom had a shared passion – books.

Indeed it was the books that got King George his Canalettos, when his agents negotiated for the bibliophile Smith’s superb library in the early 1760s. It was perfect timing. George III had just bought a private London residence called Buckingham House (now Palace), a “comfortable family home” with 775 rooms full of bare walls urgently in need of decoration. He had negotiated with Smith to buy his library for £10,000 but the 80-year-old, desperate to provide for his new (second) wife and suffering financially from the War of Austrian Succession, offered to throw in his substantial art collection for £20,000.

Smith’s vast collection of Canalettos was a result of a partnership with the painter, working as his agent and dealer as well as a collector of the artist’s work. Grand Tourists would visit Smith and view the Canaletto works on display in his Venice home, then order their own through him, whether fully worked-up painting, drawing or engraving. It was a lucrative trade for both men, with Canaletto producing view after view of Venice.

The exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery is reduced somewhat in scale from its London showing due to the smaller walls in the former. The display begins with Smith’s first commission from Canaletto, a spectacular large-scale view of St Mark’s Square, in addition to two large paintings and many key 1720s drawings, early works that Canaletto would have shown to Smith before their

Above: Venice: The Bacino di San Marco on Ascension Day, by Canaletto, c1733-34 Far left: Caprice View with Roman Ruins, by Marco Ricci, c1729

Left: A Capriccio View with Ruins, Canaletto, 1735-40