The entrance to the Grand Canal, observed from different angles, was a favourite subject of Canaletto, surely owing to the great scenographic possibilities that this view offered and to its popularity amongst his patrons as one of Venice’s most iconic locales. Canaletto painted this site throughout the course of his career, from youthful works of the 1720s to paintings he made in Venice in the last years of his life. In each instance he looked upon the subject afresh, varying the angle and the width of the vista, as well as details such as the time of day, the staffage and the boats upon the water. Sometimes he included the islands of San Giorgio and Giudecca, other times a stretch of the wharf at San Marco, while still other times he concentrated on the Grand Canal itself. Two buildings are almost invariably featured, namely the church of the Salute, with its grand dome by Baldassare Longhena, and the Dogana da Mar, the building that marks the entrance to the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal and that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries served as the customs house for all goods arriving in Venice by sea.

Constable, in the monograph that still represents the basis for studies on the artist, lists about thirty autograph views of this area, many of them also known in replicas and variants produced with the collaboration of the artist’s workshop. One of the autograph compositions, remarkably modern in its close-up depiction of the Dogana, is the present canvas. The customs house is seen from the basin of San Marco, as if the artist and indeed the viewer were seated in a boat approaching the distinctively tipped pier on which the building is poised. Much of the scene is occupied by the building itself, and by its whimsically embellished tower. The building, erected in the seventeenth century by Giuseppe Benoni, is a vast triangular structure, crowned by a tower surmounted with a golden sphere supported by twin figures of Atlas. A statue by the sculptor Bernardo Falconi representing Fortune stands atop the globe and rotates to indicate the direction of the wind—and, symbolically, the changeability of fortune itself. At left, the Fondamenta delle Zattere and the buildings lining it are visible. In the background at right, beyond the tower of the Dogana, the scene is closed by the Seminario Patriarcale, the imposing building erected in 1670 by Baldassare Longhena beside the Salute. A small rowboat has just approached the pier of the customs house, while other figures are unloading goods from other vessels. A gentleman in a tricorn hat and blue cloak stands on the right side of the pier, while other figures appear on the terrace, dotted with foliage, above the building’s portico.

The chromatic range of the work, in which greys and blues dominate but which at the same time exudes a warmth of tone, with touches of pink in the clouds that furrow the sky, together with the small calligraphic touches with which the figures and architecture are defined and with which the crests of the waves are delineated, are all elements that suggest a somewhat advanced dating, sometime after Canaletto returned from his sojourn in England between 1746 and 1755. The intimate scale of the work is also commensurate with this later period of the artist’s activity, as indeed is the artist’s investigation of a familiar vista from a novel perspective.

Though the original owner of the work and its early provenance remain open questions, an inscription on the verso of the work indicates that it was part of the collection of Auguste Châtelain, a physician, hygienist and psychiatrist who was the second rector of the university at Neuchâtel. Châtelain was moreover a passionate local historian and a collector of some note: his collection included at least two further paintings by Canaletto, one being the Lock at Dolo (Robilant+Voena) and the other depicting L’Isola dell’Anconetta (private collection). Both of these works belong to the same period of production as the present canvas, perhaps attesting to a special interest on the part of the Swiss collector in the smaller scale yet highly experimental views of Canaletto’s later period.

Finally, a recent conservation treatment carried out by Martin Wyld has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that, contrary to what Constable had asserted, the painting is not a fragment of a larger composition but was created as an autonomous composition.

We would like to thank Charles Beddington for confirming a date after 1755 for the work.