Workshop of Francesco Guardi

Guardi's small views of Venice sold steadily to foreign visitors, and not every one that left his studio was painted by Francesco Guardi himself. Assistants repeated compositions and motifs from his earlier pictures and drawings, at a modest size that suited a souvenir and a smaller budget. In his later years his younger brother Nicolò and his son worked alongside him.

Workshop of Francesco Guardi is the label a museum gives to one of those studio pictures. It places the painting in his studio and in his lifetime, made by a helper working from his designs, with the master perhaps adding a few touches and perhaps none. It says more than follower of Guardi, a term for anyone painting in his manner, and less than a plain attribution to Guardi himself.

In Boston the label belongs to a small view of the land gate of the Arsenal, the Venetian state shipyard, a subject Guardi also painted in versions now in London and Vienna.