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| Canaletto The Thames from Somerset House Terrace towards Westminster ca. 1750-51 oil on canvas Royal Collection, Great Britain |
Water
Painter of Venice and its festivals, Canaletto ended his life in London under radically different light-conditions. He depicts the Thames here on a majestic scale, employing a perspective that renders it even wider. The layout is not unlike one of his vast Venetian canals, except that the colors are so much colder. The figures, observed with the same precision as their Venetian counterparts, are quite different in their costuming and comportment.
The view is from Somerset House, famous in latter-day mystery novels as the repository of wills and marriage contracts. The river curves at this point, and the bank on which we find ourselves spreads out before us. Westminster Bridge, only recently completed, marks the horizon. Standing on the same spot today, we would see two additional bridges – Waterloo and Charing Cross. Floating above a row of waterside houses are the important monuments of Whitehall and Westminster Abbey, not yet joined by the Houses of Parliament or Big Ben. St Paul's Cathedral, the Tower, and the port are invisible to our right. Chimneys against the sky make a pattern resembling archaic musical notation.
Nostalgia
The Thames strikes us not only by the softness of its colors but by its horizontality. In Venice, rows of narrow palaces structure the space within the canvas, while here, countryside seems to merge with townscape. Traffic between the two banks is conducted by numbers of small boats with flat bottoms – English versions of the gondola – which look lost, impatient to rejoin the big ships in the port, seagoing vessels bound for remote destinations. On the river's surface at upper left, a barge with prominent cabin and a company of rowers reads like a souvenir of the now-lost Most Serene Republic, where the artist will no longer return, ardently as he may wish to.
The Thames strikes us not only by the softness of its colors but by its horizontality. In Venice, rows of narrow palaces structure the space within the canvas, while here, countryside seems to merge with townscape. Traffic between the two banks is conducted by numbers of small boats with flat bottoms – English versions of the gondola – which look lost, impatient to rejoin the big ships in the port, seagoing vessels bound for remote destinations. On the river's surface at upper left, a barge with prominent cabin and a company of rowers reads like a souvenir of the now-lost Most Serene Republic, where the artist will no longer return, ardently as he may wish to.
– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)