Canaletto at the Holburne

As I left the Holburne museum in Bath I heard two men say of Canaletto:

“They all look the same …”

It’s a crude description but has some merit to it.

Caneletto was a commercial painter sponsored by a clever, very wealthy businessman Joseph Smith, the English consul of Venice in the eighteenth century.

The Grand Tour was at it height and the most prized – and therefore most expensive artwork – was a Canaletto.  So much so that there was thriving industry in copying him.

This is not to denigrate the colour and expansiveness of his art, nor the detail, but the twenty or so pictures on view were all of Venice.

They are called veduta – roughly translated as “view”.

Venice is always a popular subject for artists from Titian to the present.

Tintoretto who, unlike Titian, stayed in Venice is probably the Venetian painter.

I had another problem with the museum – its curation.

The opening information notice was more about the algae in Venetian waters than Canaletto, the history of Venice – its rise and decline as maritime power – and the Grand Tour context barely  mentioned.

After leaving the Canaletto I visited the rest of the museum.

There were some magnificent Thomas Gainsborough portraits.

However the Holburne permanent collection itself carried a PC warning that the Holburnes made their money in slavery.

The Colstons and Pulteneys were also  cited.

Clearly the curator has strong eco and anti-colonial views but does he/she have the right to impose these on the visitor?

Normally I would leave a few quid in the glass box but here I only bought some cards at the museum shop.

Anyway, £12 to see just 20 Canalettos in one room was rather stiff anyway.