Canaletto’s view of Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day, circa 1732, will lead Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale in London on 1 July, during Classic Week London. The estimate is on request, in excess of £20 million. Having appeared at auction only twice in its 300-year history, in 1751 and 1993, the picture is in a remarkable state of preservation, with the surface beautifully textured and the rich impasto of the figures intact.
It has only recently come to light that the painting 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). Along with its pendant of the Grand Canal, this makes it 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.
The work is Canaletto’s earliest known representation of a subject to which he would return repeatedly, painted at the highpoint of his career. The two paintings remained together until the present work was sold at Ader Tajan in 1993, where, appearing at auction for the first time in nearly 250 years, it fetched a record price for an old master painting at auction in France. When the pendant was sold in 2005 it made a world record price for the artist at auction, a title it still holds twenty years later.
The paintings’ presence in Walpole’s collection was first noticed by the British art historian Sir Oliver Millar (1923-2007), who found them referenced in the 1736 manuscript catalogue of paintings at 10 Downing Street and in the 1751 auction, when they were sold by Sir Robert’s grandson, George Walpole. The scene depicts the Feast of the Ascension, the most spectacular of Venetian festivals, when the Bucintoro, the official galley of the Doge, sailed out to the Lido so the doge could cast a ring into the water in a symbolic marriage of Venice to the sea.
Andrew Fletcher, Christie’s Global Head of the Old Masters department, said the painting dates to Canaletto’s finest period and is as notable for its illustrious provenance as for its condition, describing it as the greatest work by the artist to have come to the market in a generation.
The picture will be on view at Christie’s New York from 3 to 15 May, then Hong Kong from 22 to 28 May, before returning to London for the pre-sale exhibition from 27 June to 1 July.
(Press Release)
