Follower of Giovanni Antonio Canal, il Canaletto - The Church and Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, with the Scuola Grande di San Marco and Verrocchio's equestrian monument to Bartolomeo Colleoni

oil on canvas - 17 x 13½ in. (33.2 x 34.2 cm.) - Price Realized: £24,500

Provenance: Lord Ellenborough.
Henry G. Bohn, North End House, Twickenham; Christie's, London, 19-28 March 1885, part of lot 93, as 'A. Canaletti' (85 gns. to Lesser).
Francis Capel-Cure, Badger Hall, Shropshire; Christie's, London, 6 May 1905, lot 39, as 'A. Canaletto'.
with Galerie S. Giorgio, Rome (prior to 1938).
Vincent Milligan, New York, by whom given to the present owner in 1997.

Literature: W.G. Constable, Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal, 1697-1768, Oxford, 1989, II, pp. 341-2, 308c, as a version of SS. Giovanni e Paolo and the Monument to Bartolommeo Colleoni at Windsor.

Notes: This canvas depends ultimately on Canaletto's view of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, originally owned by Consul Smith and now in the Royal Collection (Constable, no. 308), Visentini's engraving of which was published in 1742. As Constable observed, this picture differs from the prototype in being taken from the further side of the Rio dei Mendicanti and introducing a quay, which did not in fact exist. In the 1885 sale, the picture, misidentified as of San Giorgio, was sold with two others of the same unusual format, St. Mark's Quay and the Doge's Palace.

The pictures were presumably acquired by Edward Law, 1st Earl of Ellenborough (1790-1871), the Tory politician and Governor-General of India in 1841-44, whose second wife Jane Digby was one of the more flamboyant women of her age, living in Damascus after her divorce. Its next owner, Henry G. Bohn, was an influential publisher. Francis Capel-Cure, who subsequently obtained the picture, had with Badger Hall, inherited what remained of the major picture collection formed in Venice by Edward Cheyney.

Christie's London. OLD MASTER PICTURES. 25 April 2008