Pietro Longhi

While Canaletto sold grand views of Venice to tourists, Pietro Longhi painted what went on indoors. His pictures are small, quiet scenes of 18th-century Venetian life, a lady at her toilette, a dancing lesson, a card game behind carnival masks, a visit from the hairdresser, the daily theater of a city in gentle decline.

His most reproduced painting records a real event. In 1751 a rhinoceros named Clara toured Europe and stopped in Venice during Carnival, and Longhi painted the crowd of masked spectators staring at the placid animal in its pen, one man holding up the horn it had shed. It is part portrait of an animal and part portrait of a society that would pay to gawk at anything new. Longhi spent almost his whole life in Venice, ran a drawing school there, and died in the city in 1785.