Canaletto leads Christie’s Old Masters sale

Canaletto’s breathtaking view of Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day, circa 1732, will lead Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale on July 1, during the auction house’s Classic Week London, with hopes it could fetch in excess of £20 million.

Having only appeared at auction twice in its 300-year history, in 1751 and 1993, Christie’s said that the picture is in a remarkable state of preservation with the surface of the painting beautifully textured and the rich impasto of the figures intact.

Inaccessible to scholars throughout much of its history, it has only recently come to light that the picture hung at 10 Downing Street, where it is first recorded in 1736, in the collection of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745). This early 18th-century provenance makes it – along with its pendant of the Grand Canal – the earliest recorded work by the Venetian master to be hung in an English house, predating King George III’s purchase of Consul Joseph Smith’s Canalettos by a quarter of a century.

Ambitious in both scale and conception, this highly evocative view is testimony to Canaletto’s prodigious talent and exacting technique, painted at the highpoint of his career. It is his earliest known representation of a subject to which he would return repeatedly, marking the starting point for Canaletto painting such festivities.

Andrew Fletcher, Christie’s Global Head of the Old Masters Department, commented: “Seldom does a true masterpiece such as this – particularly by a painter as important as Canaletto – appear on the art market, and it is utterly thrilling to be handling its sale. This extraordinary painting of the  grandest and most familiar view of Venice, by the city’s most recognisable painter, dates to Canaletto’s finest period and is as notable for its illustrious provenance as much as for its impeccable condition. It is unquestionably the greatest work by the artist to have come to the market in a generation.”

The picture will be on on view at Christie’s New York from 3 until 15 May, followed by Hong Kong from 22 to 28 May, before returning to London for the pre-sale exhibition from 27 June to 1 July.