The Lock at Dolo

By 1763 Canaletto was in his mid-sixties and near the end of his life, and that year Venice's academy of painters finally admitted him as a member. He had spent a decade in England turning out wide, sunlit panoramas of the Grand Canal for wealthy visitors. Here he does the opposite. This is a small canvas of a quiet spot on the mainland: the lock at Dolo, a stop on the Brenta, the canal road Venetian families took out to their summer villas. The gates are shut and gondolas wait on water that barely moves. On the left a house holds a butcher's shop and a little roadside shrine, and in the foreground a lacemaker and a fruit seller go about an ordinary afternoon while the roofs and trees break up into patches of hard light and deep shadow.