Francesco Guardi

Francesco Guardi’s capriccio studies are perhaps his most individual works as a draughtsman. In his survey of the artist’s drawings, published in 1951, James Byam Shaw reiterated that studies of architectural capricci, such as the present sheet, were ‘evidently more to the taste of Venetian collectors than of foreign visitors at the time. The Venetian gentleman needed no souvenir: he could admire the gay scene in the Piazza any day of his life, or watch the Regatta, if he chose, from his balcony on the Grand Canal. But a Capriccio was something à la mode, a work of the imagination, a work of art. It is the Veduta ideata (imaginary view), as opposed to the Veduta presa dal Luogo (view taken on the spot)….but this particular category, which is so characteristic of Guardi, consists in the combination of motives taken from Venetian or other architecture, some of which are introduced with variations again and again…the Architectural Capriccio, whether in drawing or painting - and many of the drawings of this kind were adapted eventually on canvas or panel – is clearly distinct from the Venetian View in intention. It is a composition and not a view…even where a motive derives from the realities of the Venetian scene, the spirit is elsewhere, in the region of fancy.’

The composition of this drawing is closely related to that of a late painting by Francesco Guardi, one of a pair of small capricci of c.1770-1780 formerly in the collection of Robert Hays Smith in Burlingame, California, and sold at auction in New York in 2016.

The present sheet may be likened to other pen and ink bucolic landscape drawings of Guardi’s mature period, such as a Landscape with a Rustic House and Portico in the collection of the Museo Correr in Venice. The architectural sketches on the verso of this sheet can be likened to similar sketches in a drawing with four studies of a man playing with a dog, also in the Museo Correr.