Francesco Guardi

Francesco Guardi painted Venice as it was slipping toward its end. He worked in the second half of the 18th century, the last decades of the thousand-year Venetian Republic, which would fall to Napoleon just a few years after his death in 1793.

He is the great rival name to Canaletto in the trade of the veduta, the city view sold mostly to foreign visitors on the Grand Tour. Where Canaletto is crisp and exact, almost like a map, Guardi is loose and flickering. His lagoon dissolves into quick, nervous touches of the brush, the water and sky trembling with light, closer in spirit to what the Impressionists would do a century later.

He also loved the capriccio, an invented view that mixes real and imaginary buildings into a poetic ruin. In his own time the sharper, tidier Canaletto sold better, and Guardi worked hard for modest money. His reputation rose long after his death, once painters and collectors learned to prize exactly the shimmering, unfinished looseness his customers had once found too sketchy.