Is this the finest work by Canaletto remaining in private hands?

In the early 1730s, the architect William Kent was hard at work, having been hired to refurbish and remodel a handful of neighbouring buildings in London’s Westminster. He ended up converting these into the single property we know today as 10 Downing Street, the official residence and office of the British prime minister.

It had no fewer than 60 rooms and counted as its first occupants the Whig politician Sir Robert Walpole and his wife Catherine, Lady Walpole. Sir Robert was his country’s first prime minister. He was also one of the day’s great art collectors, purchasing major works by Italian, Flemish and Dutch masters.

He housed many of these at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, his family seat. However, an inventory taken in 1736 at his new Downing Street home also lists 154 paintings there. Two of the most prized hung on either side of the fireplace in the first-floor parlour: Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day and Venice, The Grand Canal, Looking North-East from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge, each one a topographical view by Canaletto.

The latter became the most expensive painting by the artist ever to appear at auction, when it was sold in 2005 — a record that still stands. The former is being offered at Christie’s in London on 1 July 2025, leading the Old Masters Evening Sale during Classic Week.

‘This is one of the most sublime works Canaletto ever painted,’ says Andrew Fletcher, global head of Christie’s Old Masters department. ‘It’s also, in my view, unquestionably the finest work by him in private hands.’

The picture offers a stunning view of the feast of the Ascension, the most spectacular of Venice’s many festivals. Falling on the 40th day after Easter Sunday each year, it saw the doge and his officials sail out into the Adriatic Sea in the Bucintoro, his official galley. There, he would cast a ring into the water, to mark a symbolic marriage between city and sea. This was a centuries-old ritual that brought residents together, and it remained a key date in Venice’s calendar until the fall of the republic in 1797.

Canaletto was the standout painter of views (vedute) of his city, and the feast of the Ascension provided a perfect vehicle for his talents. He produced several paintings of the Bucintoro’s return to the Molo (the quayside in front of the Doge’s Palace). This is the earliest known example.

Seen at the centre of the picture, the ship boasts a resplendently red roof and gilded decoration. It shares the busy waters of the basin of San Marco with myriad gondolas filled with gondoliers and elegantly dressed passengers.

The sense of activity and excitement is heightened by a large crowd gathered on the Molo. There are even spectators along the balconies of the Doge’s Palace and at the top of St Mark’s Campanile (the bell tower behind it). One can almost hear the hum of voices and the splashing of oars.

This panoramic view looks west towards the entrance to the Grand Canal, with Venice’s waterfront buildings providing an impressive backdrop to the pomp and spectacle. The work dates from the early 1730s — ‘the great decade of Canaletto’s production of Venetian views’, according to the art scholar and Old Masters dealer Charles Beddington.

It is imbued with the warm tonality of an early summer’s day. Vivid accents of colour — red, in particular — guide the viewer’s eye around the composition. For a view so expansive, the detail is remarkable — for example, the white feathers of the parasol held by the female passenger in the gondola closest to us; or the patterning of white Istrian stone and pink Verona marble on the façade of the Doge’s Palace.

Witness, too, the ripples across the surface of the lagoon, which suggest the blowing of a light breeze; and the figurehead representing Justice on the Bucintoro’s prow, holding a sword in one hand and a set of scales in the other.

Canaletto’s contemporary, the art connoisseur Pietro Guarienti, wrote that ‘he paints with such accuracy and cunning that the eye is deceived and truly believes that it’s the real thing it sees, not a painting’.

Canaletto’s vedute were much coveted by British aristocrats, many of whom were en route through continental Europe on a Grand Tour and keen to take home a pictorial souvenir of their visit to Venice.

The feast of the Ascension was well attended by tourists. In Canaletto’s depictions of it, his viewpoint often varied. The one he adopted in the work coming to auction, however, was repeated in other paintings of the same subject later in the 1730s. These included a veduta for the Duke of Bedford (dating from 1732-36), today housed at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, and one for the Duke of Leeds (1738), now found at the National Gallery in London.

Exactly how Walpole came to acquire Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day is unclear. It may have been through his son Edward, whom he had sent to Venice in 1730, charged with purchasing artworks. The picture in question may not have been painted by then, however. More likely, the acquisition was prompted by the wall space available in Walpole’s new Downing Street residence, and facilitated by the Venetian connections Edward had made. (The painting was almost certainly acquired along with Venice, The Grand Canal, Looking North-East from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge.)

Walpole’s official title was First Lord of the Treasury. However, he accrued so many powers in office that he is widely considered to have been Britain’s first de facto prime minister. He governed from 1721 to 1742, in no small part due to support from the country’s reigning royal house, the Hanoverians, which he backed at a time when a Jacobite threat to it was great.

King George II, in fact, offered 10 Downing Street to Walpole as a gift — though the latter insisted (after the refurbishment) that it be used instead by each successive head of government.

Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day hung in the first-floor parlour until Walpole left office. Like its pendant picture of the Grand Canal, it was sold at auction in 1751 following his death. Both works were acquired by the financier Samson Gideon, who displayed them at Belvedere House, his property in Kent, as part of an impressive collection of pictures that included The Gerbier Family by Peter Paul Rubens and The Immaculate Conception by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

The two Canalettos remained in Gideon’s family until 1930, and the fact that it has had so few owners goes a long way to explain the excellent condition of Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day. Its surface is still beautifully textured and the impasto on its figures intact.

The two pictures stayed together right the way through to 1993, when the work now coming to Christie’s was sold at auction in France. Interestingly, their initial provenance wasn’t known at that time. It was only discovered by the art historian Sir Oliver Millar later in the decade, when he identified them as two particular works in the 1736 Downing Street inventory and also the sale records from 1751. (The bulk of Walpole’s art collection would be sold to Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia, in 1779. It is kept today at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg — but that’s another story.)

Millar’s discovery, made before the sale of the Grand Canal picture in 2005, meant that the two paintings in question are the first works by Canaletto known to have hung in an English house. Walpole thus set a trend that persists to the present day.

‘This extraordinary painting is as notable for its illustrious provenance as for its technical brilliance,’ says Andrew Fletcher of Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day. ‘It offers one of the grandest and most familiar views of Venice, by that city’s most celebrated painter, working at the peak of his powers.’

Leading the Old Masters Evening Sale on 1 July 2025, Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day will be on view from 26 June to 1 July as part of Christie’s Classic Week season in London

Related artists: Canaletto