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Warm light pours onto white stone and brown brick buildings in a grassy landscape in this horizontal painting. Tiny people walk, stand, sit, and work across the turf, among the buildings, and over a bridge spanning a canal to our right. The people wear long-sleeved shirts, vests, britches, stockings, dresses, hats, and caps in shades of straw yellow, olive green, apple red, muted blue, brown, and bright white. Touches of peach paint suggest they are all pale skinned. The people closest to us are three men working along what might be the remains of a stone foundation in the lower left corner. One raises an instrument while another crouches nearby on the far side of the structure, and the third leans on our side, looking down at the grass. The land rises gently back to the end of a row of structures to our left. A thick-trunked tree with a sparse canopy is halfway between those structures and a building on our side of the bridge, in the center of the composition. That bone-white structure has engaged columns with capitals, a tiled roof, and a round, gazebo-like lantern or bell tower. A brick wall between more buildings line a lane beyond the tree and these structures, and rooflines pile up along the horizon, which comes halfway up the composition. People and children stand and sit on the grassy knoll or walk along the lane. The canal angles from the lower right corner of the canvas to the center of the horizon. The walls of the canal are built with thin layers of peach and tan-colored stone. Close to us, the wall on our side jogs to our left, creating an inlet or bay. A staircase cuts into the far wall to allow access to the water. Boats steered by men using long sticks carry people or supplies. A more elaborate covered boat, likely a ferry, pulls up to the base of the stairs. The stairs lead up to a plaza, which is lined with peanut-brown buildings with terracotta-brown roofs. People and dogs mill about the square and cross the bridge beyond the ferry. Some smoky-purple clouds drift into the scene from the left against an otherwise clear blue sky.

Canaletto

The Porta Portello, Padua, c. 1741/1742

Not on View

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 62 x 109 cm (24 7/16 x 42 15/16 in.)

framed: 123.8 x 77.5 x 5.4 cm (48 3/4 x 30 1/2 x 2 1/8 in.)

Credit Line

Samuel H. Kress Collection

Accession Number

1961.9.53

Artists / Makers

Canaletto (artist) Venetian, 1697 - 1768

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
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Provenance

L.T.N. Gould, Suffolk; sold 1943 to (P & D Colnaghi & Co., London); sold later that year to Francis F. Madan, London, as by Bellotto;[1] (his sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 15 July 1955, no. 88, as by Canaletto); purchased by H. Cevat;[2] (David M. Koetser Gallery, New York, London, and Zurich); purchased 1957 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[3] gift 1961 to NGA.

[1] See letter dated 8 May 1990 from Nadia E. Awad of the Getty Provenance Index, in NGA curatorial files.

[2] Christie's annotated sale catalogue lists the purchaser as "H. Cevat."

[3] See The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/2268.

Associated Names

Cevat, H.
Christie, Manson & Woods, Ltd.
Colnaghi & Co., Ltd., P. & D.
Gould, L.T N.
Koetser Gallery, David M.
Kress Foundation, Samuel H.
Madan, Francis P.

Exhibition History

1954: European Masters of the Eighteenth Century, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1954-1955, no. 4.

1961: Exhibition of Art Treasures for America from the Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1961-1962, no. 14.

1989: Canaletto, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989-1990, no. 57.

1996: Obras Maestras de la National Gallery of Art de Washington, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City, 1996-1997, unnumbered catalogue, 76-77, color repro.

1999: Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 1999, no. 84, repro.

2017: Casanova: The Seduction of Europe, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; Legion of Honor, San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2017-2018.

Technical Summary

The support is a plain-weave fabric of medium-fine weight. The tacking margins were removed during relining. The ground is light gray and is visible in small areas in the middle foreground. The ground beneath the sky, however, is a light pink-brown color and is visible through the paint surface where the overlying paint layer is thinly applied. This colored ground influences the overall hue of the lighter sky, although it is not clear whether the gray layer is applied over the entire support beneath the pink-brown layer, which is not discernible in the lower half of the painting. The paint is applied fluidly and the handling is characteristic of the artist at this date. Low impasto is found in some of the highlights and details; the sky is painted more rapidly and thinly with delicate brushstrokes that reveal the underlying ground through striations in the surface layer. The paint is applied primarily wet-into-wet, although details such as the ripples of the water and the figures have been applied with liquid strokes over the dry underlying surface paint. The tile roofs of the buildings are textured with small drops of paint. The reflections of the buildings in the water are painted wet-in-wet. X-radiographs indicate that the left edge of the Porta Portello in the center of the composition has been shifted slightly.

There is an area of considerable loss in the center of the composition measuring approximately 15.2 x 15.2 cm. Discolored varnish was removed and the painting restored by David Bull in 1993.

Bibliography

1948: Parker, Karl T. The Drawings of Antonio Canaletto in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle. London, 1948: 46, as by Bellotto.

1960: Pallucchini 1960, 107, fig. 280.

1961: Emerson, Guy. "The Kress Collection: A Gift to the Nation." National Geographic Magazine 20 (December 1961): 824-826, color repro.

1961: Walker, John, Guy Emerson, and Charles Seymour. Art Treasures for America: An Anthology of Paintings & Sculpture in the Samuel H. Kress Collection. London, 1961: 165, repro. pl. 161, color repro. pl. 162.

1962: Constable, William George. Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal, 1697-1768. 2 vols. Oxford, 1962: 1:pl. 69; 2:356-357, no. 375.

1963: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. New York, 1963 (reprinted 1964 in French, German, and Spanish): 318, repro., as The Portello and the Brenta Canal at Padua.

1965: Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 22, as The Portello and the Brenta Canal at Padua.

1968: Gandolfo, Giampaolo et al. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Great Museums of the World. New York, 1968: 54-55, color repro.

1968: National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 15, repro., as The Portello and the Brenta Canal at Padua.

1968: Puppi, Lionello. The Complete Paintings of Canaletto. Milan, 1968, 108, repro., no. 209A.

1972: Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, Mass., 1972: 43.

1972: Kozakiewicz, Stefan. Bernardo Bellotto. Translated by Mary Whittall. 2 vols. Greenwich, Connecticut, 1972: 2:459, no. Z 303.

1973: Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XVI-XVIII Century. London, 1973: 162, fig. 313, 314.

1975: European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 52, repro., as The Portello and the Brento Canal at Padua.

1976: Constable and Links 1976, 1:pl. 69; 2:383, 547, no. 375.

1979: Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1979: 1:103-105; 2:pl. 68, as The Portell and the Brento Canal at Padua.

1982: Links, J. G. Canaletto. Oxford, 1982: III, color pl. 101

1984: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 346, no. 480, color repro., as The Portello and the Brenta Canal at Padua.

1985: Corboz, André. Canaletto: Una Venezia immaginaria. Catalogue compiled by Anna Tortorelo. 2 vols. Milan, 1985: 2:652, repro., no. P 317.

1985: European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 73, repro., as The Portello and the Brenta Canal at Padua.

1989: Baetjer, Katharine, and J. G. Links. Canaletto. Exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989: 206-207, no. 57.

1989: Constable, W. G. Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal, 1697-1768. 2nd edition revised by J. G. Links, reissued with supplement and additional plates. 2 vols. Oxford, 1989: 1:pl. 69; 2:383, 547, no. 375.

1996: De Grazia, Diane, and Eric Garberson, with Edgar Peters Bowron, Peter M. Lukehart, and Mitchell Merling. Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1996: 31-35, color repro. 33.

1999: Zuffi, Stefano and Francesca Castira, La peinture baroque. Translated from Italian by Silvia Bonucci and Claude Sophie Mazéas. Paris, 1999: 352, color repro.

2004: Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 236-237, no. 186, color repro.