Francesco Guardi

Collection of Jules Duclos, Paris;
His sale, 23 December 1878, lot 17 (as by Pietro Longhi), to Groult;
Collection of Camille Groult, Paris;
His sale, Paris, Galerie Charpentier, 21 March 1952, lot 97 (as by D. Tiepolo);
Private collection, Paris, by 1952 until at least 1967;
With Galerie Cailleux, Paris, by 1974;
Acquired shortly thereafter by the present owner.

Paris, Galerie Cailleux, Tiepolo et Guardi, 1952, no. 117 (as Antonio Guardi);
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Schönheit des 18. Jahrhunderts., 1955, no. 153 (as Antonio Guardi).

Dr. H. Mireur, Dictionnaire des Ventes d'Art..., vol IV, Paris 1911, p. 357;
Tiepolo et Guardi, exhibition catalogue, Paris 1952, pp. 71-73, no. 117;
"Le Carneval de Venise", in Connaissance des Arts, no. 13, March 1953, p. 63, reproduced (as Antonio Guardi);
A. Morassi, "Novità su Francesco Guardi", in Arte Veneta, 1959-60, p. 167 (as Francesco Guardi);
T. Pignatti, Il Museo Correr di Venezia, dipinti del XVII e XVIII secolo, Venice 1960, p. 97 (Antonio Guardi);
J. Cailleux, "Les Guardi e Pietro Longhi", in Problemi guardeschi, Venice 1967, p. 53, reproduced fig. 153 (summarises attributional problem, as a late work by Antonio Guardi);
A. Morassi, Guardi. Antonio e Francesco Guardi, vol. I, Venice 1973, p. 352, cat. no. 235, reproduced vol. II, fig, 256 (illustration switched with fig. 257; as by Francesco Guardi);
L.R. Bortolatto et al., L'opera completa di Francesco Guardi, Milan 1974, p. 92, no. 56 (the reproduction for no. 57 wrongly labelled as no. 56; as by Francesco Guardi).

"The following condition report has been provided by Sarah Walden, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting has a fairly old lining and stretcher, which has preserved the surface texture well with all its impasted brushwork. There have been a few minor incidental losses in the past: one or two little horizontal retouched fillings in the upper background, one in the upper centre about a centimetre long, another a little wider further right in the upper background, one other narrow retouched line just below the central chandelier also in the background; another little horizontal retouching is in the white skirt at centre right with a horizontal line of rather fractured paint underneath and one other little semi horizontal retouched filling in the central lady's cloak. This might suggest rolling in the past but there is no general horizontal cracking, and the overall craquelure is beautifully fine and characteristic. Apart from these few past damages within the main body of the painting there are narrow bands of retouching down each side, and two short stretches of retouching near the centre of the base edge, with a little more by the right base corner. The base stretcher bar line at centre left in the slanting foreground shadow has some patchy retouching with a little vertical scratch up to the bent older figure with a muff. This older figure is in extraordinarily beautiful condition, as are many of the others, such as the carnival figure in pink and red with his back turned. Just his white neckerchief has lost a little flake in its thick impasto, although there is no other trace of past flaking. Around the little retouched horizontals in the two skirts there is some thinness, and as always it is the blacks that have been more vulnerable than elsewhere. This has meant that there tends to be a fringe of wear in any black drapery next to the most vivid costumes, for example around the pink and red central carnival figure and around the shoulder of the lady in pink and white on the left. The lady in white on the right with a spindle, perhaps Columbine, has some wear surrounding her including beneath her feet where the red ground can be seen and in the black veil behind her head where there is a small faint old knock. The shadows along the hems of the dresses have little darkened lines of old retouching in places, and there are some older strengthening touches along the outer rims of some of the black hats for instance at upper right where there are pentimenti, next to the lady with a yellow headdress also showing a pentiment. The same little touches can be seen reinforcing some thinner blacks surrounding brighter figures. The foreground has various little retouchings, and there is a more major pentiment around the legs of the central figure where flowing drapery seems initially to have been planned. The upper background is in good unworn condition apart from the few little horizontal retouchings mentioned above, and the painting has a certain amount of older varnish, with no signs of recent radical cleaning. Essentially the paint is rich and not dessicated, and the vibrancy of the colour and the texture of the brushwork are widely beautifully intact. The complex interplay of layers, for instance in the veiling of the central lady is astonishingly well preserved. This report was not done under laboratory conditions."
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This dazzling interior is a relatively early work by Francesco Guardi and one of only a very small number of his paintings depicting the interior of a Venetian palazzo. Although best known for his view-paintings, Guardi here demonstrates his skill as a narrative painter. The accomplished draughtsmanship of the twisting, leaning and stooping forms and the controlled but vigorous brushstrokes lend themselves perfectly to the portrayal of a sparkling interior in which a narrative is unfolding, the drama enhanced by the flickers of light on the corners of the damask-covered walls and the richly embroidered drapery. The episode played out before us is ambiguous, but Guardi delights in intimating relationships between characters through gesture and pose; he leads us into a theatrical world of gambling and artifice that might never be guessed at from the exteriors of the glittering palaces and churches of the Bacino and the Grand Canal that populate his better known vedute.

The scene takes place in the sala grande of the ridotto in Palazzo Dandolo in the San. Moisé district of Venice, first opened as a ridotto by Marco Dandolo in 1638 and soon to become the meeting-place of choice for much of the Venetian and foreign nobility. The ridotti were public spaces of entertainment, usually located close to theatres, where aristocrats, the middle-class and prostitutes could interact, immersing themselves in a day or night of gambling and licentiousness. Given that most attendees wore masks, the ridotti became the obvious location for illicit amorous liasons and conspiratorial plots and it was such happenings that clearly appealed to Guardi and other painters of ridotti such as Giandomenico Tiepolo and Pietro Longhi. The ridotti were described and used as the settings for a number of plays, and given the present work's theatrical nature it is indeed possible, as suggested by Alice Binion, that it depicts a scene from Carlo Goldoni's (1707-93) Donne Gelose, produced in the winter of 1752-3, in which the climax takes place in a ridotto.¹  Another writer, Giacomo Casanova (1725-98) himself, praises the ridotti for their beautiful women and they were thus the ideal location for his seductions. It was however their reputation as hothouses of conspiracy and financial ruin that ultimately cost them their existence and in 1774 all twenty ridotti were closed through a decree of the Maggior Conseglio, on the Doge's orders, though later many re-opened as casinos.

Guardi painted several similar views of the ridotto at Palazzo Dandolo (the only ridotto he painted) and all are closely related in terms of the figures they contain. They can be loosely classed into two separate groups: the first of these includes three works that depict the scene from a point far back in the room so that the room itself becomes the focus, rather than the figures, which are now given far more space in which to circulate; one is in the Ca'Rezzonnico (fig. 1; where it hangs with a pendant, the Parlatorio, and these are the pictures considered by Morassi as "tra le opera più celebri della pittura veneziana del Settecento"),² another is now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, bequeathed from the Heinemann collection (paired with a View of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio)³ and another is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.⁴ The second group includes the present work, another formerly in the collection of Baron Edmond de Rothschild and offered in these Rooms in 2007 (fig. 2),⁵ and another sold in these Rooms in 1992;⁶  these three works all lend themselves to a greater sense of intrigue, being of squarer format and taken from a point right up against the now bunched-up figures, and we can now interact intimately with the characters where, in the first group, we are distanced from them. We now see their gestures and facial expressions and the room takes on a new level of theatre and psychological interplay. These pictures are less depictions of a palazzo interior, more genre scenes where the characters themselves are the subject.

In his representations of the ridotto at Palazzo Dandolo, Guardi was clearly inspired by Pietro Longhi's painting of the same room (fig. 3).⁷  Although taken from a viewpoint further to the right than the present work, and thus from a point closer to that of the Ca' Rezzonico, Fitzwilliam and Heinemann versions, it shows a very similar arrangement of figures to each of the Guardis, notably in the stooping gentleman to the left, the seated gambler behind him, the central female figure in elaborate dress, and the group of three figures in the right foreground. Of all Guardi's versions the present work differs most markedly from the Longhi both in its close-up viewpoint and in the twisting male figure in the foreground wearing bright red pantaloons who in every other version wears a sinister floor length cloak.  

Guardi depicts the interior of the ridotto as it was prior to its remodelling in 1768 by Bernardino Maccaruzzi, providing a neat terminus ante quem for the painting.⁸  Most scholars agree on a dating for the present work in the 1750s, and it thus precedes the artist's view paintings which he only undertook from the last years of that decade. On the basis that the figures are wearing morette, a round black mask, which fell out of fashion circa 1760, Alice Binion dates the Ca'Rezzonico painting (and thus all other versions) to 1753-60. Morassi likewise dates the group to the 1750s while Pedrocco dates them to the 1740s, based on the presumed dating of the Pietro Longhi on which the composition appears to be based, as well as the type of female costume worn. It was however in the 1750s that Francesco and Longhi were in closest contact, and Francesco's copies after Longhi's sacraments date from this time, so it seems most likely, as Morassi and Binion suggest, that the present work dates from that decade.

Both the present work and the Ca' Rezzonnico paintings were both attributed to Pietro Longhi in the 19^th century, the latter despite many old inventories citing Francesco Guardi as their author. A related pen and wash drawing in the Art Institute of Chicago has been attributed to both Francesco and Antonio, to the latter seemingly on the basis of an inscription on the back bearing his name (fig. 4).⁹  Succi, however, recently published the drawing as a work by Francesco, while in the same publication attributing all the paintings to Antonio,¹⁰ an attribution which seems difficult to sustain on stylistic grounds (see below). Morassi, Pilo, Pedrocco and Montecuccoli degli Erri have published the Ca' Rezzonnico ridotto as Francesco and it was exhibited as such in The Glory of Venice in London and Washington in 1994-95.¹¹  Regarding the present work, in his seminal catalogue of Guardi's paintings Morassi gives it, together with all the other ridotti, to Francesco, a view shared by Ralph Toledano in recent private correspondence.

The figures in this and the other paintings are much closer in style to those of works securely attributed to Francesco, such as his Miracle of a Dominican Saint in Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum¹² or the figures on the quay in his Rialto Bridge from the South in the collection of Paul Channon MP.¹³ Francesco's figures have a solidity of form wholly different to the multitude of flicks of paint that constitute those of Antonio in the great canvases in the Cantoria dell 'Angelo Raffaele in Venice, perhaps his grandest commission.¹⁴ If one considers all the ridotti as by the same hand, as all modern scholars tend to, then the fact that the pendant to the Heinemann ridotto is signed by Francesco lends further weight to the argument behind his authorship of them all.¹⁵

1.  See A. Binion, Antonio and Francesco Guardi: Their Life and Milieu with a catalogue of their Figure drawings, New York and London 1976, no. 88. 
2.  Morassi, vol. I, pp. 351-2, cat. no. 233, reproduced vol. II, fig. 253. The quote translates "amongst the most famous works in 18^th century Venetian painting"- see Morassi, p. 161.
3.  Idem, vol. I, p. 352, cat. no. 236, reproduced vol. II, fig, 258.
4.  See D. Succi, Francesco Guardi, Milan 1993, p. 230, reproduced fig. 258.
5.  See also Morassi, under Literature, vol. II, fig, 257 (caption inverted with fig. 256).
6.  Anonymous sale ("The Property of a Lady"), London, Sotheby's, 9 December 1992, lot 80, as 'Giovanni Antonio Guardi', for £335,000. The principle difference between the two works is in  their relation to the doorway at the right which, in the ex-Sotheby's version, is much further to the right and the recess seems a little shallower.
7.  See also T. Pignatti, Pietro Longhi, Venice 1968, reproduced fig. 168.
8.  The design of the new ridotto is seen in Gabriele Bella's painting in the Querini Stampalia, Venice.
9.  See D. Succi, op. cit., p. 225, fig. 251.
10.  Except the present work which he does not mention at all.
11.  M. Merling, "The brothers Guardi", in The Glory of Venice, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington 1994-95, pp. 303-307, reproduced p. 306, and pp. 455-6, cat. no. 202.
12.  M. Merling, op. cit, p. 303, fig. 51.
13.  Idem, pp. 314-15, figs. 210-11.
14.  F. Pedrocco, Antonio Guardi, Milan 1992, pp. 256-267.
15.  On the base of a column at the left: F.co G.di