This riveting view of Venice by Francesco Guardi is by far the latest of the Italian paintings in the Straus Collection and is one of only two landscapes.¹ It was displayed not with the earlier Italian paintings in the music room of the Strauses’ Park Avenue apartment, but in the boudoir, together with mainly eighteenth-century French works, with which it harmonized in style as well as in spirit. It is said to have originally been painted for an Englishman, John Ingram, living in Venice. This seems somewhat unlikely, if the date of 1783 is correct, since Ingram was born in 1767. However, he was indeed one of Guardi’s patrons, and neither the authenticity of the work nor his ownership has ever been in doubt.² Many museums around the world, including the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection in London; the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina own similar versions.³

Francesco Guardi was born into an extensive family of painters. He and his brothers, Giovanni Antonio and Nicolò, followed in the footsteps of their father, Domenicos, and their sister, Caecilia, married the internationally renowned artist Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770). During the early part of his career, Francesco worked with his brother Antonio, mainly making copies of works by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters. He probably did not embark on producing view paintings before Canaletto’s death in 1768, but it remains uncertain whether he did in fact study with this celebrated master of this genre.⁴ Scholars agree that he reached his artistic apex during the early 1780s. He continued to work during that decade, and as late as 1789 was described as “a painter still living at Venice; and who, though he has taken to Canaletto’s department, has still followed a particular manner, which is spirited and quite his own.”⁵

The Straus Collection’s painting is typical of Guardi’s mature style, which is less meticulous in the rendering of architectural details than comparable works by Canaletto, but is livelier in the depiction of human activity and more impressionistic in the rather loosely painted renderings of skies and reflections. In the Straus version, the imposing church of Santa Maria della Salute, situated directly at the beginning of the Grand Canal, has a slight air of decay as it rises languidly above the hectic activities of the almost Lilliputian figures peopling the embankment between the church and the customhouse, the Punta della Dogana, at left. The gondolas in the foreground are occupied by somewhat larger figures who guide their vessels across the mirror-like surface of the Grand Canal. The carefully balanced accents of brightly colored costumes enliven the blue-green tonality of the painting.

Situated at the beginning of the Grand Canal and directly across from the Doge’s Palace, Baldessare Longhena’s magnificent church of Santa Maria della Salute and the Punta della Dogana (the important customhouse) constitute a site of utmost importance in the life of Venice, and thus figure largely in Guardi’s oeuvre. He painted at least fifteen versions of this view and even more of each building separately.⁶ For the most part, they stem from his mature period, and the Straus painting is deemed of high quality among this group of works.⁷

The painting has often been compared with the version in the Wallace Collection, London, Venice: The Dogana with Santa Maria della Salute (c. 1770s), with which it shares its luminosity and silvery tonality. The Wallace Collection version, however, is seen from a slightly different point of view, the expanse of the water in the foreground enlarged and peopled with more boats and boatmen. The composition is harmoniously rounded off at left with a tall sail, which is missing in the Houston version. This sail is even more prominent in the Munich painting, the angle of vision having changed again more to the left. The version most similar to the painting in Houston is the one in the collection of the Columbia Museum of Art (fig. 22.1). Neither the London nor the Columbia versions extend quite as far to the right as the Straus painting, which includes a few more houses to the right of the church. Another version, almost identical to the Straus Collection painting (fig. 22.2), was sold at auction in 2012; its whereabouts are presently unknown.

—Helga Kessler Aurisch