(Nove 1824–1884 Venice)
Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice,
oil on canvas, 43 x 63 cm, framed

Provenance:
sale, Christie’s, South Kensington, 28 February 2002, lot 128 (as Manner of Canaletto);
Private European collection;
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Fabrizio Magani for suggesting the attribution of the present painting and for his help in cataloguing this lot.

Francesco Zanin is of significance within the production of Venetian nineteenth century view painting (see F. Magani, La Venezia dei Grubacs, Treviso 2017), distinguishing himself from his contemporaries with precise citations from historical examples of view painting, as can be seen in the painter’s depictions of Feste or celebrations, such as the Punta della Dogana during the Solemn Regata in honour of the Duke of York (private collection) in which the precise detailing of the bissone, or ceremonial gondolas represented, allows the subject to be pinpointed to a precise historic event: the procession of 4 June 1764, celebrating the visit of the Hanoverian prince of England, Edward Augustus, Duke of York and Albany.

Zanin’s career as a vedutista began during the 1850s: the painter’s initiation in the genre almost certainly occurred during his apprenticeship at the Accademia di Venezia. Indeed, in 1855 Zanin was awarded for his two views of the interior of Saint Mark’s Basilica, as one of the winning students of the ‘Scuola di Composizione’. Zanin’s name could thereby stand alongside that of other affirmed painters such as Luigi Querena who in the same year depicted an historicised composition depicting the Lotta de’Pugni of 1573 on the Foscarini bridge, Venice, in the presence of Henry III of France on the balcony of Palazzo Foscarini while Giovanni Grubacs presented the more vaguely entitled Celebration on the Grand Canal by night.

Magani dates the present painting to the early 1760s, comparing it to the Punta della Dogana, dated 1864 (see D. Succi Il fiore di Venezia dipinti dal Seicento all’Ottocento in collezioni private, Gorizia 2014, pp. 359–360). The present painting fully belongs to the genre re-evoking the most glorious phase of eighteenth century Venetian vedutismo. Indeed, the combination of the setting and the crisp, clear light drawing the eye into the composition’s tight perspectival framework, are among the factors that in the first instance would suggest this is the work of a skilled eighteenth-century view painter. A closer and more accurate stylistic examination of the painting however reveals the authorship of Francesco Zanin: a master whose body of work is gradually forming around a nucleus of works of considerable quality, such as to single him out as one of the most talented view painters of the second half of the nineteenth century.