FRANCESCO GUARDI (Venice 1712–1793), The Rialto Bridge with the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi. UPDATE: THIS MADE £26.2 MILLION
A painting by Francesco Guardi handed down through generations of the Guinness family will lead Christie’s Classic Week Old Masters evening sale in London on July 6. The Rialto Bridge with the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi is being sold for only the second time since it was painted in the mid 1760’s. It is expected to make around £25 million.
It is one of a pair of Venetian views by Guardi, one looking north and the other south, first acquired in 1768, probably from the artist, by a young English grand tourist called Chaloner Arcedeckne. Both paintings stayed in his family until 1891 when they were sold privately for £3,850 to Edward Cecil Guinness, the chief executive and then chairman of the brewing company. He was the first Earl of Iveagh. The two Guardi’s were kept by the Guinness’s and hung at Pyrford Court in Surrey. They were separated in 2011 when Rialto Bridge from the Fondamenta del Carbon, was sold to an anonymous bidder at Sotheby’s for £26.7m–a record for a Venetian view painting. A temporary export bar failed to keep the work in the UK.
Henry Pettifer, Head of Christie’s Old Master Paintings EMERI said: “This majestic view of Venice is one of the great masterpieces of eighteenth-century view painting. Painted in the mid-1760s, at the height of the artist’s career, this is a monumental tour de force displaying the full range of Guardi’s technical virtuosity and his unique ability to capture the atmosphere and sensuous experience of being in Venice. After the record-breaking Old Master sales at Christie’s in 2016, with the Rubens Lot and his Daughters and the pair of Rembrandt portraits sold by private treaty, we are confident this great Guardi will arouse enormous interest from global collectors of masterpieces, from Old Masters to Contemporary, this July.”
The Rialto Bridge with the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi will be shown at Classic Week in New York from April 22-26 before returning to Venice for the first time for an exhibition at the Aman Hotel (May 8-15) to coincide with the Venice Biennale. It will then travel to Hong Kong for exhibition from May 26-29 before returning to London.
