Displaying items by tag: canaletto

Featuring a hundred drawings from the Uffizi, the Ashmolean, and Christ Church, Oxford, Titian to Canaletto is a groundbreaking exhibition based on new research. Venetian art has long been associated with brilliant colors and free brushwork, but drawing has been written out of its history. This exhibition highlights the significance of drawing as a concept and as a practice in the artistic life of Venice. It reveals the variety of purposes and techniques in drawing from Bellini, Titian and Tintoretto to Tiepolo and Canaletto.

For most people, Canaletto is the artist who depicted Venice – the painter of some of the best known and most beautiful views of his home city. But for nearly ten years he was an adopted English artist chronicling a society which, unlike Venice, was changing at an unimaginable pace.

A new exhibition opening to the public on Saturday will for the first time bring together paintings Canaletto produced in Britain. Unlike previous shows, it will examine his stay between 1746 and 1755 in a social as well as an art history context.

“He is painting a new, vibrant and confident Britain,” said the show’s curator, Steven Parissien. “Things are looking good in Britain and it often takes an outsider to see it.

Many in the crowd of dealers, collectors, and onlookers attending Sotheby's main sale of Old Master paintings on Thursday January 29 remarked on the difference that a single day made when contrasting the sale with the dismal results at Christie's Old Masters sale the day before (see: Canaletto, Caravaggio Fail to Sell at Christie's Worst Old Masters Sale Since 2002).

The sale totaled $57 million, as compared with an overall presale estimate of $54–77.6 million. Of 104 lots offered, 73 (or 70 percent) found buyers. The stronger sold-by-value rate, 78 percent, reflected spirited bidding on a few key lots.

Sales of Old Masters got off to a slow start as about $42 million of art from the 15th to 19th century was auctioned in New York.

Christie’s sold $36.6 million, missing its low estimate of $54 million in three sales yesterday. Of the 54 lots in its paintings sale, only 22 were sold. Sotheby’s drawings sale totaled $5.3 million, within its estimate of $4.2 million to $5.9 million.

The auctions, which continue through Jan. 30, are offering about $200 million of paintings, drawings and sculptures. The auction houses are trying to revive interest in what had been the most popular category until the 1980s, when other groups such as modern and contemporary art gained favor.

Abbot Hall was built in the Palladian style just three years after Canaletto left England for the last time. In 1746, by then in his late 40s, he first arrived for a prolonged stay in London. He was to remain for most of the following 10 years.

Already a well established artist, his work had proved very popular with aristocratic Englishmen doing their Grand Tour of Europe. In the 1720s, having started his career as a theatrical scene painter, Canaletto started painting his distinctive views of Venice, frequently featuring the many major churches designed for it by Palladio.

Sotheby’s January 2015 Old Master Week in New York will feature a select group of highly important paintings assembled by noted collector J.E. Safra. The choice offering of 17 paintings presents a wide range of styles and genres of the period including the Dutch Golden Age, as well as 18th century Italian and French. The vast majority of the works have been off the market for at least 20 years and together the group is estimated to bring $22/34 million. The paintings will go on public exhibition, alongside Sotheby’s Old Master Week sales, beginning January 24.

Leading a very strong group of Dutch works to be offered in Sotheby’s January 2015 sales is "Frozen River at Sunset," painted by Aert van der Neer in or shortly after 1660, a period that was a high point for Dutch landscape painting and for the artist himself (est. $4/6 million).

The Norton Museum of Art presents "Master Prints: Dürer to Matisse," featuring astonishing works on paper including woodcuts, etchings, engravings, aquatints, and lithographs that range from the 15th to 20th centuries. This not-to-be-missed exhibition brings together several of the earliest as well as later examples of the golden age of printmaking. Works by old masters Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, and Canaletto, will be displayed alongside those of modern masters Degas, Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne. The exhibition is on view through Sunday, Feb. 15, 2015, and is accompanied by a video demonstrating printmaking processes, and texts describing the role prints held in society before the advent of photography.

“Each and every work in this exhibition is rare, and of a breathtaking quality that is no longer available on the market,” says Jerry Dobrick, the Norton’s Curatorial Associate for European Art.

Around the middle of the 15th century, as the development of the printing press in the West led to an unprecedented exchange of ideas, artists began to make prints. By the year 1500, a new art form and a new means of communicating ideas was widespread—one that had as great an impact in its time as the Internet has had in our own.

Carnegie Museum of Art holds an exceptional collection of prints from this period, from the masterful innovations of Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt in 16th- and 17th-century Northern Europe to the fantastical prints of Canaletto, Tiepolo, and Piranesi in 18th-century Italy. Small Prints, Big Artists, opening this summer, presents more than 200 masterworks from the museum’s collection of over 8,000 prints. The intimately scaled woodcuts, engravings, and etchings reveal the development of printmaking as a true art form. Due to their fragility, many of these prints have not been on view in decades.

The Portland Art Museum in Oregon is the only U.S. venue for "Venice: The Golden Age of Art and Music." The show focuses on La Serenissima" or "the most serene," the period between the early 16th century and the fall of the Venetian Republic at the end of the 18th century that was defined by a surge in artistic innovation. During this time, music and art flourished thanks to painters such as Tintoretto, Canaletto, and Guardi, as well as composers such as Willaert, Gabrieli, Monteverdi, and Vivaldi.

Organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition is the first to explore the important interrelationships of the visual arts and music in Venice's civic ceremonies, festivals, and culture. The show will present 108 objects from 38 lenders including paintings, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculptures, original period instruments, and early music texts. Period music will be audible in the galleries to create a more comprehensive visitor experience.

 "Venice: The Golden Age of Art and Music" will be organized by theme. Sections will include -- Basilica of San Marco, which will explore Venice's center of religious devotion; Civic Pageantry, which will look at the many festivities and processions held throughout the year in Venice; The Scuole and The Ospedali, which will explore the impact that schools and hospital orphanages had on art and music in Venice; Musicians and Concerts, which will look at the impact and importance of music in the city; Popular Music; and Mythology and Opera.  

 "Venice: The Golden Age of Art and Music" will be on view at the Portland Art Museum through May 11, 2014.

On January 17, London’s National Gallery will send Edouard Manet’s ‘The Execution of Maximilian’ on a tour of the UK. The painting is the first work to embark on the three-year Masterpiece Tour, which is part of the National Gallery’s commitment to promote the understanding, knowledge and appreciation of Old Master paintings. In 2015, Canaletto’s ‘A Regatta on the Grand Canal’ will join the Masterpiece Tour, followed by Rembrandt’s ‘Self Portrait at the Age of 63’ in 2016.

‘The Execution of Maximilian’ depicts the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian being executed alongside two of his generals. Mexican forces captures Maximilian, who was installed in Mexico as a puppet emperor by Napoleon III when Napoleon withdrew his French troops who had been occupying Mexico. After its completion in 1868, the painting was cut into smaller pieces, some of which were sold individually. Edgar Degas eventually purchased all of the surviving fragments and reassembled them on a single canvas.

‘The Execution of Maximilian’ will be on view at the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge through March 16. It will then travel to the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle (March 22-May 18) and the Mead Gallery at the University of Warwick (September 27-December 6).