Giovanni Antonio Canal was born in Venice, the son of a theatrical scene painter. He became known as Canaletto, probably to distinguish him from his father, with whom he worked as a scene painter. When he was 22, Canaletto visited Rome and became enthusiastic about the work of the vedute painters he saw there. Vedute paintings are extremely detailed and accurate pictures of cityscapes, or other panoramas, which originated in Flanders and the Netherlands during the 16th century. In Rome, Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691–1765) and some Dutch vedute painters inspired Canaletto. From them, he discovered an understanding of precise perspective and tonal contrasts and he made many architectural drawings. By 1720, he was back in Venice. He became a member of the painters’ guild and abandoned theatrical scene painting, instead producing views of Venice in strong chiaroscuro.
Although these views were enchanting, he soon realized that they were not as exact as they could be. In rivalry with Luca Carlevaris (1665–1731), a painter, etcher and architect in Venice who instigated the use of a camera obscura for greater accuracy, Canaletto began to produce views that were more dramatic, smoother and topographically accurate than before. These included Venetian ceremonial and festival subjects, such as the Regatta on the Grand Canal.
Canaletto developed an outstanding talent for perfectly composed, evocative views of Venice, characterized by clear-cut realism, glass-like finishes and bustling life. He became extremely influential and successful, famed for his skill, individual approach and rendering of atmospheric light. As a perfectionist, he used the camera obscura to make sure that his basic outlines were accurate, but his overriding concerns were with creating engaging compositions and he produced numerous meticulous preparatory drawings for every painting he undertook. Canaletto’s works were not symbolic or religious, but they were objective studies of the unique city built on canals and lagoons. His fluid, thinly spread paint and small brushmarks included tiny touches of color, creating sparkling, shimmering impressions of the people, architecture, ships, water, skies and reflections.
The War of the Austrian Succession, which lasted from 1740 to 1748, led to a reduction in the number of visitors to Venice, severing Canaletto from his main patrons and badly affecting his lucrative business. In the early 1740s, he turned more to drawings and etching. Frequent visits to London in 1746 led to Canaletto painting views of London and his patrons’ castles and homes for the next ten years. In 1763 he was at last elected to the Venetian Academy of Fine Arts and continued to paint until his death in 1768.
Key Works
Grand Canaclass="underline" Looking North-East from the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli to the Rialto Bridge c.1725, GEMÄLDEGALERIE ALTE MEISTER, DRESDEN, GERMANY
Grand Canaclass="underline" The Stonemason’s Yard; Santa Maria della Carità from the Campo San Vidal c.1728, NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON, UK
Piazza San Marco: The Clock Tower c.1730, NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM, KANSAS CITY, MO, US
The Reception of the French Ambassador in Venice 1740s, STATE HERMITAGE, ST PETERSBURG, RUSSIA
A View of the Ducal Palace in Venice 1755, GALLERIA DEGLI UFFIZI, FLORENCE, ITALY
HOGARTH
1697–1764 • MORALIZING PAINTINGS—ROCOCO PERIOD
Marriage à la Mode: 4, The Toilette
c.1743 OIL ON CANVAS
70.5 × 90.8 CM (27¾ × 35¾ IN)
NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON, UK
This was the first of Hogarth’s sardonic series of paintings that mocked high society. The works gained wide recognition, as he made engravings from them. Each work tells an episode in one story, with clues about what has happened previously appearing around the picture.
William Hogarth considered himself to be a dramatist in paint. By satirizing contemporary society in his paintings and engravings, he created a new direction in art.
The fifth child of a schoolmaster, London-born William Hogarth was forced to earn money after his father’s premature death in 1718. Five years previously, he had started his apprenticeship to a silver plate engraver, and by 1720 he had set up an independent business as an engraver, taking on commercial work including bookplates and etched cards. In his spare time, he also studied painting at St. Martin’s Lane Academy. His first paintings were small portrait groups called “conversation pieces”—informal group portraits, popular in Britain at the time, where the sitters are sometimes involved in a conversation. He also painted lifelike, delicately colored and sensitive portraits and large history paintings.
Deploring what he saw as the corrupt and sordid society of mid-18th-century England, Hogarth began producing paintings and prints that parodied all he disliked about it. These took shape as sequences of paintings that satirized contemporary politics, customs and behavior. They were usually cautionary tales of vanity, dishonesty and duplicity and were inspired by the new types of popular literature—novels. Hogarth’s friendship with the novelist Henry Fielding (1707–54) is believed to have prompted this idea. Successful from the start, his first series, completed in 1731, was the six-scene The Harlot’s Progress; this was immediately followed by The Rake’s Progress and then Marriage à la Mode. These works made him widely known in Britain and abroad and his engravings of them were so plagiarized that he lobbied for the Copyright Act of 1735 as protection for writers and artists. In 1735, he opened his own academy in St. Martin’s Lane, London.
Key Works
A Scene from the Beggar’s Opera c.1728, THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, DC, US
The Tavern Scene (A Rake’s Progress) 1732–4, SIR JOHN SOANE’S MUSEUM, LONDON, UK
A Rake’s Progress 1732–5, THE SOANE MUSEUM, LONDON, UK
The Graham Children 1742, TATE BRITAIN, LONDON, UK
CHARDIN
1699–1779 • ROCOCO PERIOD
Soap Bubbles
c.1739 OIL ON CANVAS
61 × 63 CM (24 × 24 IN)
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK, US
Admiring the Dutch artists of genre and still life, Chardin often included vanitas elements in his own works. This painting of a boy blowing a bubble from a pipe symbolized the fragility of life. Chardin’s subject, palette and composition have been selected with great care.
One of the greatest painters of the 18th century, Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin documented the life of the Paris middle classes through his wholesome still lifes and domestic interiors.
A Parisian who rarely left the city, Chardin was largely self-taught and was influenced by artists such as de Hooch. Apprenticed for a short time to the history painters Pierre-Jacques Cazes (1676–1754) and Noël-Nicholas Coypel (1690–1734), when he was 25 he became a master in the Académie de Saint-Luc. In 1728, he was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and began to paint scenes of everyday life in bourgeois Paris, and still lifes using muted colors, seemingly tangible textures and soft lighting. Chardin’s humble subjects had not previously been considered worthy for painting and his work contrasted with the historical and Rococo paintings that characterized most French art at the time. Nevertheless, from 1737, Chardin regularly exhibited at the Paris Salon—the annual exhibition set up by the official Académie, where works displayed were selected by a jury. From the 18th and throughout the 19th centuries, the Paris Salon was held annually or bi-annually and was the greatest art event in Europe. Through this exposure, Chardin attracted patrons from the French aristocracy, including King Louis XV.