Capriccio with Roman Ruins

Canaletto died in 1768, and in the decade that followed, in the museum's words, Francesco Guardi became his true heir in Venice. This small upright canvas, 43 centimetres tall, is dated to those years, between about 1770 and 1780. It is a capriccio, an invented view that mixes real and imaginary buildings, and here the material is Roman ruins.

Painters of capricci borrowed freely, from one another and from prints. In one documented case Guardi took a composition of ruins by Giovanni Paolo Panini, the Roman specialist in such views, from a French engraving after it and repainted it in his own manner. The museum calls the capriccio the natural outcome for an artist used to quotation, assembly and copying.

The picture came to the gallery in 1962 with the bequest of Dimitri Sursock, Duke of Cervinara, in a group of 18th-century paintings that also brought Bernardo Bellotto's view of a market square in Dresden.