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We're in the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace

and this is the display space

where the Royal Collection can be seen by the public.

The Royal Collection is unique

in that it's spread across many royal residences.

So the paintings can be seen on display at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle,

but also at Hampton Court, Kew Palace or Kensington Palace.

The Royal Collection is the art collection

that's been accumulated and collected by many successive generations of monarchs

and it includes paintings, drawings, prints and decorative arts.

The Royal Collection is now held in trust by Her Majesty the Queen

and it's here that the public can come to see parts of the collection.

The Royal Collection has the largest assemblage of works by Canaletto

in the world.

It has major paintings, drawings and etchings.

So one of the things we can show is not only the range of works by Canaletto

but also the way in which he moved in his creative process

from drawing to the final painting.

With this exhibition, all the works were originally assembled

by the collector, Consul Joseph Smith, an Englishman who was living in Venice

and who sold his entire collection to George III in 1762.

Smith not only collected works by Canaletto

but also by the other artists working at the same time in Venice.

These artists included Sebastiano Ricci, Marco Ricci,

Rosalba Carriera, Luca Carlevarijs,

Zuccarelli, Piazzetta, and others.

This gives us a unique opportunity

not only to show a large body of Canaletto's works in the Queen's Gallery

but also to examine and put into context

some of Venice's most influential artists of the 18th century.

There are three main characters in this exhibition.

First of all, of course, Canaletto, Venice's most famous view painter.

And secondly, his main agent and dealer, a British man called Joseph Smith,

and thirdly we have Venice itself, Venice the city.

Venice was a great tourist destination in the 18th century

and somewhere which was a real thriving centre

for all kinds of artistic production, not just Canaletto's view paintings.

Luca Carlevarijs is the great precursor.

He's the first great view painter of Venice.

But when you compare his work with Canaletto's,

it looks very stiff and old-fashioned.

In fact, there's a remarkable letter

written by an art advisor in 1725 to a client,

in which he advises him to stop buying view paintings by Luca Carlevarijs

but to turn to this new artist, young Canaletto,

whose work is like Luca Carlevarijs's but you can see the sun shining in it.

It's his eye which separates him from his rivals

and what makes him into one of the great Venetian artists of the 18th century.

The first time when I visited the exhibition,

I was particularly struck by the variety of Canaletto's visual intelligence.

The quality of his draughtsmanship varies immensely,

and there is a sort of continuous balancing

between optical accuracy, geometrical layout,

and then a visual impression and transformation of the optical data,

and then the ways in which the paintings are composed.

They always show different aspects of Canaletto's invention,

to the point that you can feel, or you can follow, Canaletto

thinking not only about Venice,

but thinking about architecture,

thinking about the difficult, sometimes, history of Italy,

and how this architecture is an important part

of what Venice, the Veneto, Italy was for Canaletto and his contemporaries.

Canaletto has defined the image of Venice to the British to such an extent

that it's easy to forget he was working in a much broader cultural sphere.

So by reuniting Canaletto's paintings with works by other Venetian artists,

we get a much fuller picture

of the cultural and social life of the city in that period.

So we've got history paintings,

which were the most highly regarded genre of the period,

by Sebastiano Ricci,

landscape paintings by his nephew, Marco Ricci,

and also some of the undercurrents that were influencing Canaletto at this time.

So the interest in Palladian architecture, for example,

which was of great interest to Joseph Smith

and to other scholars and collectors in Venice and in Britain,

the capriccio, which was a genre of painting

that was particularly taken up by Venetian artists

involving the combination of reality and elements from the imagination.

So we see a much broader picture of the life of Venice

through this lens of the collection of Joseph Smith.

So the thinking behind this exhibition was to showcase the finest collection

of Canaletto paintings, drawings and etchings in the world

and to further the understanding of his work and his life

and to recreate and show Venice

in all its cultural diversity and life in the 18th century.

You had huge numbers of British Grand Tourists travelling to Venice

and enjoying the pleasures that it had to offer.

Not only the annual carnival,

which took place in the period between St Stephen's Day on 26 December

and the beginning of Lent,

which was when people would wear masks and carnival costume,

you had lots of annual festivals that were celebrated in the city.

Venice was also a thriving centre for the opera.

There were 17 opera houses in the city by the end of the century.

We are in the north fringes of Venice,

nearly facing the lagoon, the sestiere of Cannaregio,

one of six sestieri, six districts of the city.

So the city is in the middle of a lagoon.

In the Middle Ages, in early Middle Ages, in the fifth century,

when the lagoon started to become what we know as Venice,

this area was just muddy waters and natural canals with no buildings on it.

But originally the Rialto side of the lagoon, the Venice we know,

was made up of a cluster of islands,

and they were not necessarily connected with each other.

The basic unit of the city, of the urban space of Venice, is the square,

with a well at the very centre, a church possibly,

and the buildings around the square.

Each of these units was an island, a small insula, in Latin.

Every building in the island rests on a layer of mud,

where posts are thrust in.

This mud actually helps to preserve the wooden posts.

Every building is staying on this stable layer, but very flexible layer of mud.

So basically we can say the architecture of Venice

stems out of the sea, of the lagoon.

That's why so many travellers over the centuries were in awe,

because of this miraculous architecture just springing out of the water.

There were two particular places in Venice which were really important.

One was the area around San Marco,

which was the political and religious life of Venice,

and the other was the Rialto,

which is geographically the narrowest point of the Grand Canal

and where it was obvious to build a bridge.

And around this bridge grew up the major trading offices of the Venetians

but also of foreigners working in Venice,

for example, the Turks and the Germans and so on.

Its power was in trade

and importing and exporting goods from the East to the West.

Venice had an extraordinary reputation from the medieval period onwards.

For a start, it's an extraordinary city,

the fact that it is in the sea, it's an island in the sea.

But it was one of the wealthiest and most populous cities

of the medieval period and had this extraordinary trade with the East.

So this was the emporium

where all the luxuries and exotic goods from the East came through.

So the velvets, the spices, the silks which are imported into Britain,

these come from Venice.

From the medieval period Venice has been associated in people's imaginations

with ideas of luxury, with ideas of the exotic.

And it's been extremely powerful.

Because it was so wealthy, it was a real player in European power politics

and formed alliances with other European states.

This is the era when Italy was composed of city states and small principalities.

So because of its wealth, it was a mover and shaker

and played a very important part in the crusades, for example,

led resistance against the encroaching Ottoman Empires.

It was also extraordinarily stable.

It had been established, so the story had it,

by Romans fleeing Rome after the fall of Rome

and so this is where its pride and its liberty came from,

that it was the last remnant of Roman liberty and it had never been conquered.

So it had always been independent.

It had always existed without being conquered by another power.

It had an extraordinarily stable government

and in the 17th century this became extremely attractive or interesting

to politicians in Britain

because Britain was going through enormous political upheaval

with the Civil War and the debates about the monarchy

and where does political power lie, what is the best sort of government.

And Venice seemed to offer an example of what was regarded by Aristotle

as the best form of government, mixed government.

That is, it combines monarchy in the person of the doge

with the aristocracy in the senate and the people in the Grand Council.

And this system of checks and balances

ensured that power didn't become despotic

and there wasn't any danger of popular uprising

and therefore these checks and balances provided the stability.

This is a commercial republic that Britain feels it can identify with.

It has the kind of balance of power that many people in Britain were aspiring to.

It was resisting the papacy, and so they see a lot of similarities.

So particularly in the late 17th century,

there was a lot of political interest in Venice

as offering a model of government.

Canaletto was baptised Antonio Canal in the parish of San Lio in Venice in 1697.

His father was Bernardo Canal, a stage painter.

Canaletto must have begun his work training in his father's studio,

where he would have learnt the skills of perspective,

these skills very important in theatrical stage designs.

His name appears in the libretti for some operas in Venice

by Vivaldi and Orlandini.

The Canal family were, I think, what we would call upper middle class.

Unlike some of Canaletto's rivals, for instance,

who came often from the lowest echelons of Venetian society,

Canaletto did fancy himself as slightly grand.

There is a da Canal coat of arms,

which, in fact, he uses as a signature in the later stages of his career.

He's obviously rather proud of coming from a family that has a coat of arms.

Canaletto was called Canaletto

because he needed to be distinguished from his father Bernardo Canal.

He was a little man and canaletto means "small canal".

I imagine him as being rather gentlemanly,

solitary and quite possibly a bit difficult.

Canaletto ended up supporting all three of his sisters

and was clearly kind to them and good at being supportive.

I think if he was more flamboyant and a well-known social figure in Venice,

one would have heard more about it from contemporary diarists.

There are very few references to him.

We think that he was born in a small courtyard in the middle of Venice,

which one can still go and see, in an upstairs apartment.

We know that he lived there,

because he did drawings from it, two of which survive

and are particularly fresh and immediate drawings done out of his windows.

But we know really very little about his early life at all.

We don't know whether he had any training

from anybody apart from his father.

The one thing that we are told is about the key change in 1719-20,

when he goes to Rome with his father to help with the design of theatre sets,

when apparently he was so inspired by his surroundings

that he decided to draw and paint them.

He clearly had a significant natural talent.

Canaletto famously excommunicated himself

from the theatre and from this life

and in 1720 he was inscribed into the painters' guild in Venice.

At this stage Canaletto was painting large capriccios,

so views incorporating Roman remains

in these imaginary settings on a large scale.

But he then turned to painting views of Venice.

There is a sort of misunderstanding when we reflect on the term veduta,

because most people would understand it as being an accurate reproduction

of a cityscape, or a landscape, a view,

something that can be almost photographed, in a certain sense.

And especially in the case of Canaletto,

there is this idea that when he is presenting us

with, for instance, a representation of Piazza San Marco,

this could be a sort of photographic impression of what he saw.

And this is not right.

First of all he tried actually to sketch, to have a sort of sketch

of the place he wanted to represent.

But then he would just recreate

a sort of half-optical and half-reinvented cityscape.

He almost blurs the contours, the lines.

They become optical impression,

they become artistic matter in a certain sense,

and nothing is exactly the way we think it is,

because there is something specific to Venice

that only travellers and those who visit the city can understand.

And he transforms his Venice.

It's something that is very specific to him.

What we're looking at here are two preparatory studies

that Canaletto made for Joseph Smith sometime in the early 1720s.

They're preparatory studies for the first commission

that Canaletto made for Smith,

and this was for a set of six monumental paintings

that are also in the Royal Collection.

We're lucky to be able to show the preparatory studies,

as well as the paintings that they were intended for.

And Canaletto would have submitted these drawings to his patron

to make sure that he approved of his designs before he carried them out.

They were intended as pairs.

You can see in the paintings and in the studies

that the weight of the architecture is on one side of the sheet or the other.

The drawings are quite loose and free in their execution,

especially compared to some of the other drawings we have by Canaletto,

which are very highly finished.

This is because they weren't intended to show

the minute details of the architecture.

They were just to show to Smith

as an example of how his finished paintings might look,

and just to convey the drama that he intended to put across in the paintings.

What's interesting about Canaletto's paintings

is that it's really clear to see that he was working on the canvas,

changing his mind as he worked and painting bits out.

It's been great that we've been able to find out

that he was going through the same working process in his drawings.

In particular, we've taken an infrared image of this drawing on the right,

which shows the two columns at the entrance to the Piazza San Marco.

One is crowned with the Lion of St Mark,

and the other, which we don't see in the pen-and-ink drawing,

has a statue of St Theodosius.

But the infrared image has shown

that actually, in his underdrawing, Canaletto originally drew in the column

with the statue of St Theodosius in the right place,

but then worked over the top with pen and ink,

probably decided that the column was too much, perhaps,

and decided not to draw it in.

But when we go back to the painting, he's changed his mind again

and he's returned the column to its correct place in the painting

and painted out the column on the left,

probably to make the two work better as a pair.

These paintings were commissioned for a particular room

in Smith's palazzo on the Grand Canal,

and they would have been intended to hang in pairs,

in a very dramatic arrangement.

And Canaletto has chosen the Piazza San Marco,

the area around San Marco which is the civic and religious heart of Venice,

so highly recognisable sights.

I think what makes Canaletto a great artist

is his uniquely sensitive observation of things,

which might be weather or light effects,

people going about their daily business, how dogs behave.

I've always been a particular fan of Canaletto's depiction of dogs.

I'm sure he was a great lover of dogs.

Each one is different and each one has a different character.

It probably derives ultimately from Dutch painting,

but it's entirely new in Venetian painting in the 1720s.

What we're looking at here is one of Canaletto's only surviving sketchbooks.

It's in the Accademia in Venice.

And it's a fascinating document,

because it shows us Canaletto's first response to the city he saw around him.

He would have carried it with him around Venice,

making notes into it of the façades of the buildings,

mainly sequences on the Grand Canal, in this sketchbook.

It dates to around the 1720s,

so around about the time that he was first starting to make view paintings

and to sell them to patrons.

This page, for example, shows...

Here is the Ca' Rezzonico, on the left, which was then known as the Ca' Bon.

It's a sequence moving across to the Ca' Foscari.

You really get a sense of how Canaletto was using the pages of the sketchbook

to record the view.

So he continues the sequence here, the edge of the Ca' Foscari here,

and then he's moved further down the canal,

and so the Ca' Foscari is now much larger.

So he redraws, again, the façade of that building, and continues the sequence.

The Palazzo Balbi, the last building on the previous page, continues here.

And so the sequence continues through the book.

And he's also annotated it with his notes.

So we've got buildings labelled like the Ca' Bon and the Ca' Foscari.

But we've also got little notes that are going to help him later

when he's making his paintings.

So B is for bianco or white.

R here is for rosso or red.

Then, here, sporco is dirty,

so he's saying that the façade of the building is a bit dirty.

And you've got splashes of paint.

It's a working document that he was using

to record his first insights into the city.

This opening is very unusual, because it shows boats and figures.

We've got, on the left-hand side, some of the details of the boats

that Canaletto was recording in front of the Ca' Foscari.

They're drawn in a very similar way to the architecture,

so the pen and ink, very simple outlines.

But then when we move to his figure studies,

they're drawn with a much greater flourish, much looser,

and little flicks of black chalk.

So here we've got the little flicks that show the folds in this man's trousers,

or the water carrier's,

the little details of the man's leg lifting

as he lifts to pour the water into the container that's held by the little boy.

These characters, Canaletto is really enjoying recording.

The interesting thing about the way that he's drawing these characters

is that he takes a very similar approach in his paintings,

where they're painted with little flicks of the brush.

Here it's little squiggles of black chalk.

It gives them a real vibrancy and emotional energy,

which is really going to give the narrative focus to his paintings.

Canaletto's figures, which are always very individual...

In the same way that he doesn't repeat his own compositions,

he also doesn't repeat figures.

He always approaches the figures for each painting anew.

What does happen with them is that they tend to get more and more unnecessary.

And certainly in his late work,

they sort of disintegrate into calligraphic dots and dashes.

All of Canaletto's paintings were painted in his studio.

A commentator at the time thought that he painted on the spot out of doors,

but he didn't.

He used drawings as quite detailed notes

which then informed the paintings that he made.

And therefore it is so amazing

that he recreated these paintings which look absolutely realistic.

The joy of this painting, for me, is the strong contrasts.

The darks are very dark and the lights are very bright.

And the contrast between the way the architecture's painted very formally

and the crowd scene.

You get a lot of highly impasted little blobs.

So over here the chicken coops.

The hens poking their heads out of the coops are completely convincing

with just a few little touches of impasted paint.

And then the group of the figures watching the Punch and Judy show.

Here's Mr Punch just appearing out of the curtain.

Canaletto's very good at just putting a few little blobs on

to make the sunlight catch the face of the audience.

And what I love about this one is that instead of just painting the folds

of the fabric of the back of the puppet booth,

you have really the sense of somebody's body.

Someone or somebody is in there pushing out the back of the curtain.

And what's charming about this painting

is that there's a little fingerprint here by the artist.

He's just modulated the light paint.

The fingerprint is definitely the artist's.

It's into the wet paint,

being the most efficient way of making the right stone texture,

just in that little bit.

You don't get fingerprints happening very often in his work,

so it's more charming and more precious that it's there.

One of the very early accounts of Canaletto's life by Zanetti

says that Canaletto used camera obscura.

In fact he was able to teach how to use it well.

So from that basis people have therefore thought

that he must have used a camera obscura.

Today we are much more sceptical,

because of the evidence that we actually show in the exhibition

that all his drawings were very carefully prepared in the studio.

The camera obscura is a box with a pinhole in it

and a mirror which projects an image

of, for instance, a building in front of the artist

onto a sheet of paper, which can then be traced.

It's very useful for the establishment of the basics of a composition,

but it's no good for detail.

Obviously, it cannot be used except in a static position,

which in Venice obviously rules out its use on any form of water.

There's an enormous amount of recent work, particularly in Italy, done

on Canaletto's use of the camera obscura, which is unquestionable.

The main issue at this point

is to balance one's feelings about its usefulness,

because, on the one hand, having a mechanical aid of that sort

was an essential ingredient to the way that these painters operate,

but, on the other hand, the reason that they're artists

is because they can take the mechanical

and make it into something entirely their own.

There's a long-running debate about whether Canaletto used a camera obscura

and so when we were preparing this exhibition

we were interested to look closely at the drawings

and to see if we could find evidence of the use of this mechanical instrument.

One of the things we did

was we took some infrared photography of the drawings.

This is a technique which works by the infrared rays

passing through the pen and ink on the surface of the sheet

because it doesn't contain any carbon,

but they won't pass through any underdrawing,

so any pencil or chalk underdrawing which does contain carbon.

So you get these very clear images of Canaletto's underdrawing.

What this has shown is that these drawings were very carefully constructed

in the studio using a pencil and ruler,

because you get these very clear perspective and horizon lines.

You get vertical lines that extend not just for the façade of the building,

but extending into the water

where he would have drawn the corresponding reflections.

So we see that he's very carefully constructed these drawings

in the studio,

probably from his outline sketchbook studies

that he would have made while walking around the city.

But no evidence at all that he was using a camera obscura in this instance.

I think it's very important to understand

that Canaletto ran a very active studio

and, in order to meet the vast demand for his work,

Canaletto inevitably employed first his family,

his father presumably, two nephews,

one of whom was particularly talented,

but also other artists, in order to help at least in the preparation of canvases,

which could then be finished off with the master's magic touch.

The interesting thing about Canaletto and the other painters of the time

is that, for view painting, Canaletto doesn't really have any competition.

He is simply the best.

This is a mock-up of how the paintings would be constructed.

So you can see that the canvas is very coarse and open weave

and the priming is this red, water-based layer

which is quite thickly applied and fills the interstices of the canvas weave.

And then in the area of the sky, there's a pink layer

and you can see that here I've inscribed lines like Canaletto would have done

into the paint.

But also he does sometimes leave the rulings obvious.

There are times when he needs to enhance the illusion of architectural form

and then he leaves those lines visible.

And here at the bottom we've got a kind of broad blocking in of stone colour

and you can see that that's happening on the painting here.

If you take away all the details you can see how broadly it's painted.

Well, the 16th century is considered the golden age of Venetian art

and especially Venetian painting, the most famous painter being Titian.

Other big names, of course, are Tintoretto, Veronese.

They are leading figures, but not the only ones, of course.

There is a huge production of arts in general

and painting more specifically over the 16th century

which will be very influential later,

and especially for painters working in the 18th century.

Venetian painters were regarded as the masters of colour,

and they were very influential.

Even later, 17th-century, 18th-century painters

looked to Titian and Veronese especially as examples of beautiful painting,

and especially the way they handled colours.

I think that there are several factors. Again trade, perhaps.

The availability of pigments you had in Venice was unique

and even Raphael ordered pigments from Venice.

In the 16th century, there is a fascination

for the sensuality of Titian's colour especially.

It's thick, textural and extremely charming.

What I believe people are struck by when they look at a Venetian painting

is precisely this unfathomable effect that colour has on your sight.

We're in the Accademia in Venice,

and I'm standing in front of The Feast of the House of Levi,

a major biblical feast painting by Paolo Veronese, the 16th-century artist,

which Veronese painted for the refectory of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.

More than any other 16th-century artist,

it was Veronese who represented Venice

as the 18th-century patrons, collectors wanted to see Venice,

represented the stateliness, the magnificence, the power of the city.

Veronese was also very important for two major artists of the 18th century,

Sebastiano Ricci and Giambattista Tiepolo.

They copied his works. They also emulated his style.

In this case

we think that Sebastiano Ricci actually came and stood in front of the painting

and possibly had his canvas with him, and he noted down heads.

And the particular heads that he chose

were the central heads of Christ and St John in conversation.

Some figures beside also in conversation.

They were very quickly painted on bare ground,

they have a great vitality about them.

Sebastiano Ricci's copies of these heads were really famous at the time,

well-noted by everyone.

But if you look at the heads you can see

that Sebastiano Ricci has actually brought all the 18th century

into the 16th century.

They have a bravura,

they have a particular vivacity that was very typical of the 18th century

and not so much of the 16th century.

It's a huge canvas, and you had to be in full command of the whole thing.

Every detail is in the right spot,

and it's not just a matter of making it ornamental and magnificent,

it's a matter of making it meaningful.

And I think what Ricci sees in Veronese is precisely that,

the way Veronese creates very poised, composed situations out of a narrative.

This painting was completed in 1726

and is part of a set of seven Old Testament scenes.

More than any other artist, Sebastiano Ricci transformed painting

from the heaviness and darkness of the Baroque of the 17th century

into the light and fluency of the 18th century.

A good example of this particular style

which was taking off in Venice is the black king on the right of the painting,

who stands in such an elegant pose,

wearing sumptuous clothes in rich whites and gold and blue,

and epitomises the sense of theatre, of drama, of light and colour,

which transformed painting at that time.

This style was popular both with the Venetians and across Europe

and with the British who welcomed these Italian artists

who could decorate their houses in such a magnificent way.

The exhibition provides a remarkable opportunity

to see all these fabulous paintings done for Consul Smith.

Smith is a major figure in Venetian painting of the 18th century,

because he was one of the great patrons of contemporary artists.

He had a major collection of old art,

but also bought works

from most of the more interesting Venetian painters of the day,

which he used initially to decorate his house.

He had exceptional examples.

Consul Smith had his house just a few hundred yards from the Rialto Bridge

and built up his wealth through the import and export trade,

particularly fish and wine.

Of course Canaletto didn't live that far away from the Rialto Bridge.

He lived in the San Lio area,

so both patron and artist were in the same neighbourhood.

Joseph Smith was a British merchant and banker

who was educated in London at Westminster School

and in about 1700 took the decision to move to Venice

where he worked for a banking firm, Thomas Williams.

He worked initially as a merchant and trader trading fish and meat,

but he also began this great interest in art collecting,

particularly collecting books at first,

but then moving into patronising artists.

Joseph Smith was also a keen opera lover,

so he was married to Catherine Tofts, an English opera singer.

It's through these connections with the stage

that he probably first met Canaletto.

In the Museo Correr is this book,

which was commissioned by Pietro Gradenigo,

who asked Giovanni Grevembroch to supply these wonderful images of dignitaries,

and in fact the whole of Venetian society is represented here.

It was started in the mid-18th century,

precisely when Canaletto was at the height of his powers.

The page that I'm looking at is called Console in Venezia,

and it is dedicated at the bottom of the page to Consul Smith,

so we think that this must be an image of Consul Smith.

The top part is an explanation of what a consul does,

and in particular the consul from Britain.

It's to do with trade and the business of trade,

and it's certainly not to do with politics.

It's a very good job description for Consul Smith.

And then at the end there is this wonderful sentence

about how Consul Smith has been living in Venice for many years

and it's thought that he has fallen in love with the city,

so much so that he had a wonderful palace built at his own expense

on the Grand Canal.

It shows very much, very clearly,

the love that Consul Smith had for the city,

but also the respect that he was held in by people like Gradenigo.

Consul Smith, I think, is extremely interesting

for the way in which he combines commercial interests

with being a connoisseur and a dealer in art.

And he's very strategic about this.

He has his palazzo on the Grand Canal which is the prime tourist site.

And he invites people to the palazzo

and this is where he can show them the Canalettos.

One of the complaints that people very often made about Venice

was that the Venetian nobility didn't consort with foreigners.

Because of the paranoia of the Venetian state

that they didn't want any state secrets divulged,

they didn't want the security of the state imperilled,

the Venetian nobility would not mix with foreigners.

Going to Consul Smith had that added advantage

that this was a house that you could freely enter

and he would make sure

that people were exposed to the kinds of paintings that he wanted to sell

and then he was able to act as the agent and make a profit in doing so.

We're standing in front of the 12 views of the Grand Canal,

which is a unique set of paintings

recording the entire length of the Grand Canal

from the start of it at Santa Chiara

right down the canal to the mouth and where Santa Maria della Salute is.

We think that the idea for the set evolved during the 1720s,

because the first in the series is the Santa Chiara,

which was painted around about 1722-3, so very early,

at precisely the time that Canaletto was painting the early San Marco series.

Technically it's very similar to those paintings,

but by the end of the decade the idea of a complete set was finalised

as a commission between Canaletto and Consul Smith.

These would have been hung in a major position, we think,

in Consul Smith's palazzo

and visitors would have been able to come and admire them

and if they liked they could commission versions of their own

to have back in Britain.

It wasn't just tourists who came to Joseph Smith's palazzo

on the Grand Canal.

He also had a great network of scholars and collectors.

He was widely admired by Carlo Goldoni, the dramatist,

who wrote a play after him.

He was also interested in a lot of the current trends

in architectural thinking at this time,

particularly the great interest in the work of Andrea Palladio,

the Venetian 16th-century architect,

which underwent a revival in the 18th century.

There's a lot of evidence that Joseph Smith had much broader interests

than just the commercial side of his dealings with Canaletto.

He was interested in books, he built up a great library

and was involved in the setting up of the Pasquali press,

which printed important Enlightenment texts.

Printmaking in Venice

is a very important adjunct to the marketing of view paintings

by producing a large series of engravings of Venetian views.

These engravings disseminated the compositions of the view painters

to the far ends of Europe.

We're standing in the print shop of Gianni Basso,

which is in the Cannaregio district of Venice.

He uses a lot of traditional printmaking techniques

that would've been used in the 18th century.

Venice in the 18th century was a real thriving centre

for printmaking and book production.

Artists like Canaletto and Marco Ricci and Tiepolo took up etching themselves.

But it was also in places like this

where Grand Tourists and visitors to Venice

could buy, especially, reproductions of Canaletto's paintings.

Perhaps they couldn't afford to buy an oil painting,

but they could afford to buy a print.

In 1735, Antonio Visentini made a set of reproductions

after Canaletto's most important paintings

in Consul Smith's house on the Grand Canal.

So visitors could consult this prospectus of prints

and decide which versions they might commission for their own collection.

Or they might simply decide to acquire the prints to take back to Britain.

Joseph Smith was very interested in printmaking and print culture in Venice,

and in the 1730s he set up his own printing press, the Pasquali press.

He employed Antonio Visentini as one of its principal draughtsmen,

and lots of the prints that were made by artists

were then published as sets through Pasquali.

Every significant English visitor to Venice would have met Consul Smith

and probably been invited round to his house,

where they would have been greeted with this fabulous display, floor to ceiling.

And from the early 1730s onwards,

he could produce this set of engravings and say,

"Please tell me which numbers you'd like and I'll get them to send them to you."

The business was extremely well organised,

because Smith's brother lived in London.

Paintings would be shipped to London

and delivered to the client by Smith's brother

and he would collect the payment.

Both Joseph Smith and Canaletto were clearly very shrewd

and they knew their market

and they knew that there was a market there for these views of Venice.

Actually, it's interesting because Venetian families themselves

were not really interested in buying his paintings.

It was mainly a tourist market that Canaletto was catering towards.

These Venetian families were instead commissioning

history paintings or decorative schemes

by artists like Sebastiano Ricci or Tiepolo to decorate their houses

because, for them, they didn't need to have a painting of Venice

because they could look out of the window,

whereas British Grand Tourists taking these souvenirs home

wanted to hang them in their country houses

where they could be reminded of this great period in their lives.

Woburn Abbey is the family home of the Dukes of Bedford

and it has been in their possession since 1547

when it was gifted in the will of Henry VIII to Sir John Russell

who later became the first Earl of Bedford.

The fourth Duke of Bedford,

who purchased the 24 views by Canaletto of Venice

that are in the collection here at Woburn,

acquired them on his Grand Tour in 1731.

We know that he was in Venice.

At that time he was Lord John Russell.

He hadn't inherited the title from his brother.

He became the duke in 1733

and we know that he went back to Venice again in 1736.

The fourth Duke of Bedford would have been a very young man

when he arrived in Venice. He was 21 years old.

So he would have started his Grand Tour probably when he was 19

and he would have been conscious that as part of that tour

he was acquiring works of art

which would have effectively given a sense of his own taste.

So when he got home he could use them to decorate his home

and be able to show his companions and his contemporaries

that he'd been on a Grand Tour, he'd seen these things first-hand for himself

and that he was clearly as a consequence an educated man.

The Grand Tour is a journey that was generally undertaken by young men

during the 18th century

and that's the way in which historians usually use it.

It's this idea of young men who have left school, might have left university,

they'll be in their mid-to late-teens

and they're sent off by their parents on an extended tour of Europe.

But a lot of it's about acquiring the social skills and the political know-how

and ideas of taste and culture

that will enable them to fulfil a position when they come back home.

Here we've got the bill for one of the three invoices

for the supply of the Canaletto views of Venice at Woburn.

This one is dated February 1733

and it's made out to His Grace, the Duke of Bedford,

and it's signed by Joseph Smith, who then becomes Consul Smith.

But if we have a look at the other side

we can see that it's actually been acknowledged

or rather that the cash has been received by John Smith.

John Smith was the brother of Joseph Smith who acted as his agent in London,

sort of facilitating the sales through to the English aristocrats

who'd purchased these objects on their Grand Tour.

We don't know exactly how the fourth duke

would have first come into contact with Consul Smith,

but we do know that Consul Smith was supplying pictures

by various different artists to English aristocrats when they came to Venice.

Although many of the views that exist of Venice by Canaletto

are representing the same scene,

there are very subtle differences between them,

so no two are actually identical,

although at a passing glance you might be forgiven for thinking that they are.

And this is quite an important detail in Canaletto's work.

One of the views of Venice that exists in the collection here at Woburn

shows the Arsenal, which was the centre,

the controlling point of Venice's maritime power and influence,

and it controlled the trade routes into the Adriatic from Europe,

which Venice had historically managed to do.

Therefore it really represented a control of the sea

and a route through which wealth could be accumulated

through trade with the East with luxury goods and materials,

such as, for example, lapis lazuli,

which had been such an important commodity

in terms of the birth of Venetian art during the Renaissance.

The military and particularly maritime associations that Venice had

were something which the British aristocrats could really relate to.

They saw a parallel perhaps with the Republic of Venice

and the British nation itself,

both being maritime powers controlling trade through the sea

and being able to express their power

through their navy and their control of the water.

So whereas in the first half of the 18th century what you find overwhelmingly

are the sons of the aristocracy and the landed gentry,

in the second half of the 18th century you're finding families,

you're finding older men,

you're finding professionals, people who aren't from the landed elite,

you're finding lawyers and doctors and physicians,

and also a lot of women travelling in family groups

but sometimes independently.

Women often tend to be much more sensitive

to things like poor hygiene and smells.

Everybody talks about the smell in Venice,

but, in general, women are much more likely

to talk about the cleanliness of the streets, the cleanliness of the beds

and the way the food has been prepared.

She'll tell you about the washing that's hanging out of windows

whereas that tends, again, not to feature in the comments that men make.

Women were also particularly interested in art

and often provide very detailed comments about what they've seen.

One of the most popular artists among Grand Tourists

was the female artist Rosalba Carriera.

She began her career working as a miniature painter

but soon specialised in these pastels

that are drawn on paper but framed and hung like pictures.

And everyone who was anyone wanted their portrait done by the famous Rosalba.

And Joseph Smith acted as her agent and dealer

shipping these portraits back to Britain.

And he also had one of the greatest collections of her pastels,

of which these two personifications of Summer and Winter

were two of the most highly prized among his collection.

It was very unusual to be a professional female artist in this period.

Carriera came from a family of lacemakers

and one of her sisters was married to the Venetian painter Pellegrini.

But she mingled in this circle of great artists.

She knew Sebastiano Ricci and Canaletto

and she was very much up there with the rest of them

in terms of her great success across Europe.

Although they look like oil paintings

these pastels are made with fabricated chalks and they're drawn on paper

and it gives them this very delicate and fragile quality.

Actually the pigments in these chalks are very prone to fading.

So we know from when we took Winter out of its frame

during the conservation for the exhibition

that the gown that Winter is wearing was originally a very bright fuchsia pink.

So we're not looking at the colours

as they would have been seen by the 18th-century viewer

but the delicacy and subtlety is still something that's much admired.

The British were the most numerous among travellers in Europe.

This wasn't confined to the British elite

because it was very much a sense of a common European heritage,

that most of civilised Europe... well, all of civilised Europe

traced its civilisation back to Rome.

But the British were the most numerous and they were also the wealthiest,

so they made the biggest impact.

So some places like Rome or Florence, the big tourist centres...

There were certain places you wanted to be at particular times of the year.

So, for example, Rome. It was always good to be there at Easter,

because that's when you had the ceremonies of Easter

and the washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday

and then the great mass on Easter Sunday.

And then they'd go south to Naples for the period of Lent,

because there was more going on in Naples and the climate was warmer.

And then the great thing was to be in Venice for Ascensiontide

which is when you had the ceremony of Sposalizio.

So you'd go up north again for Ascension,

which, depending when Easter was, would probably be sometime in May.

In the 12th century the pope gave the doge a gold ring

and the right to marry the sea as a sign of his lordship over it.

Ascension Day is very important for the Venetians

because it is the day that they celebrate the marriage of the sea.

This painting shows the occasion of the marriage of the sea

but what we see here is that the Bucintoro,

which was the doge's ceremonial galley,

has returned from the ceremony and is about to dock.

We have an open view of the figures.

We have them arranged on two decks,

so the most senior, the procurators and senators in red at the top with the doge

and then below, just a little bit below on the next open deck,

you have the nobility in black.

So you have this wonderful reflection of society of Venice in the Bucintoro.

You see onlookers everywhere. They're right up the campanile.

At the very top there are figures seated

with their feet very perilously over the edge watching,

and at the corner you see one man with a telescope to his eyes

keeping a watch on what's going on.

It's very typical of Canaletto,

the way in which he crops a view so that boats seem to continue out of it

and this gives a sense that you're standing there taking a photograph

and that the whole ceremony is continuing all around you.

But of course the most important thing about this and about Canaletto

is that when he painted light it's with this absolute clarity.

So we have spring light here which is clear and wonderful

and the light filters through all the gondolas.

You see reflected light and sunlight interchanging

as your eye goes over the painting.

Everything that's important is in that view.

It summarises Venice completely.

In the 1740s the War of Austrian Succession

interrupted the flow of visitors to Venice,

and so there were not only fewer tourists coming to the city

but it was also more difficult to ship paintings back to Britain,

and so Canaletto was short of work.

the first for a series of five paintings of Roman views

that were finished in 1742

and the second for a series of over-door paintings

that declared Smith's allegiance to Palladianism in architecture.

But this wasn't really enough work

and so in 1746 Canaletto decided to travel to London.

For an artist who made a living as a view painter,

I think he showed a remarkable reluctance to travel.

There's a note by a contemporary

that why would Canaletto bother to come to England,

because everybody who wants a painting by him has got one already.

It's around this time that, in fact, the whole family disperses.

The two nephews both leave Venice and go and live abroad as well.

But I think also an important element

is that I think that he himself had quite simply got bored.

He'd spent the whole of the 1730s painting views of Venice,

and in the 1740s he shows every sign of agitation

and he starts doing all sorts of different things.

He starts doing capricci again, he takes up printmaking.

I see the move to England in 1746 as part of this restlessness.

I think he wants a new challenge.

I think the main reason why Canaletto chose England

is obviously because that was his main source of patronage.

Most of the paintings that Canaletto executes in England are not of Venice.

There are fabulous views of England, notably London and Warwick Castle.

He refigured the River Thames as if it were the Grand Canal,

showing London as if it were Venice.

He was received in Britain with mixed success

but he did have a great influence on topographical artists

working in the city.

And then in 1755 he decided to come back to Venice

where he remained for the rest of his life.

In the same year, 1755,

Joseph Smith published the catalogue of his library, the Bibliotheca Smithiana,

that was published by his own Pasquali press,

and this listed the contents of his significant library,

his books, manuscripts, prints and albums of drawings,

and this was with the intention of finding a prestigious buyer.

The young George III who was Prince of Wales at the time

had advisors and agents in Italy

seeking out works of art and books for his collection,

because of his interest in the visual arts.

Close advisors to him heard that Smith's library was for sale

and negotiations were opened.

And it was suggested that he might like to buy the library

for the sum of £10,000.

The Seven Years' War intervened which interrupted negotiations.

They resumed in the spring of 1762

and by that stage Smith had offered to sell not only the library

but also his entire collection of paintings, gems and books,

so the total of that would have been about 500 paintings

and around 15,000 volumes.

By the end of 1762 the sale was finalised but now for a sum of £20,000,

which was sold to George III who had come to the throne in 1760.

At the same time George III bought Buckingham House, now Buckingham Palace,

which he wanted to have as a private residence

for him and his growing family.

So it was, in a way, a very happy coincidence

that these paintings arrived.

After his return from Britain, Canaletto carried on working in Venice

making many drawings and paintings of the city

and he was finally accepted into the Venetian Academy in 1763.

But we don't know a lot about his personal life.

He never married,

and he seems to have been a relatively solitary figure

towards the end of his life.

Canaletto died in 1768 after an illness of five days,

in which his symptom is described as inflammation of the bladder.

He was buried in the same church in San Lio in which he was baptised.

Canaletto was not the wealthy man at the time of his death

that one would expect him to be.

We have an inventory of his possessions made after he died,

which includes as one would expect

a number of unfinished or unworked canvases, but remarkably little else.

There are a number of shirts and there are a few spare pairs of trousers,

but certainly none of the trappings of wealth

that one would expect of a painter of international renown.

Since Consul Smith ended up as a very rich man indeed

and Canaletto very much didn't,

he may be an early example of an artist

who was very much exploited by his dealer.

What one can never know, of course...

We know how much some of these noblemen paid Smith,

but of course we don't have any idea

how much Smith actually passed on to Canaletto.

I think he is a master

and I'm not sure that his role has been rightly understood in art history,

because actually we tend to associate him with a certain idea of Venice.

But then we can see in many of his drawings and paintings

he's also reflecting on the Venetian tradition,

and not just the tradition of architecture,

but also on other elements of the tradition.

There is a real thinker there,

there is a technique that is developing,

and that technique is going towards the future.

When I look for instance at the beautiful rendering of the pediment

in the representation of the Pantheon,

we will see actually that there are patches of brown, of blue, of grey.

That pediment is almost disassembled into patches

and then recomposed together.

That technique is becoming artistic avant-garde.

I think Canaletto is, first and foremost, a great topographical artist.

He could record what he saw and observed with absolute precision.

But I think on top of that he could take reality

and create something imaginary and ideal and poetic

from the ordinary and the actual.

And I think he did that through his incredible expertise with paint.