A drawing of the Bacino in Venice. On the right are the buildings of the Riva degli Schiavoni, with Campanile beyond. In the centre is the church of Santa Maria delle Salute. In the foreground are two moored boats, and groups of figures on the quayside. Many boats and gondolas are shown on the Bacino.

The present finished drawing agrees with a drawing in Darmstadt (AE 2198) in most particulars, such as the presence of two bays of windows in the building to the right, but with the dominant foreground mast eliminated and the Campanile moved to the right. While the excessive scale and discordant perspective of the Forni Militari (third from the right) in the Darmstadt drawing have been tamed, there remains a spatial discontinuity between the Forni and the buildings beyond, making it appear that the Riva stepped back at that point. The line of buildings along the horizon were transcribed from a succession of six openings of the Venice Sketchbook. Canaletto also used the composition for two variant paintings (Vienna and Sir John Soane’s Museum).

The normal assumption would be that this finished drawing was executed soon after the Windsor and Darmstadt sketches. But the style of the drawing is that of Canaletto’s works of a decade later, with looping figures and two different shades of ink - relatively pale and applied with a fine nib for the outlines and lighter shading, much darker and dashed in with a broad nib for the pools of shadow. It seems that, as so often in the later 1730s, Canaletto based the composition of a finished drawing on a work of several years before.

Catalogue entry adapted from Canaletto in Venice, London, 2005