Canaletto’s luminous Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day, has sold for a record price of £31.9 million at Christie’s on Tuesday evening, eclipsing its upper estimate and setting a new auction benchmark for the Venetian master.
Once part of the grand décor in the offices of Robert Walpole—Britain’s inaugural prime minister—the painting’s sale underscores both its historical provenance and the enduring magnetism of Canaletto’s vision, with bidding surpassing expectations set at £20 million, the result reaffirms the artist’s place at the pinnacle of 18th-century view painting.
When “The Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day” surfaced at auction in 1993, it marked only the second time in nearly three centuries that this commanding Venetian view had been publicly displayed. Its rediscovery now, bolstered by newly uncovered provenance linking it to Sir Robert Walpole—the first British Prime Minister—is a seismic event in the canon of eighteenth-century art collecting.
Preserved with astonishing fidelity, the painting retains much of its original impasto, particularly across the festooned figures that populate the Bacino di San Marco. Its condition, so rare for a work of this ambition and age, owes much to its tightly contained chain of ownership. The painting’s early provenance began at 10 Downing Street, where it hung in Walpole’s private rooms as early as 1736—a detail unknown when it last crossed the block.
Painted around 1732, at the crest of Canaletto’s first golden period, this composition is his earliest known depiction of the Bucintoro’s grand return to the Molo on Ascension Day—a motif he would revisit in increasingly sophisticated iterations over the next two decades. Yet, in this early work, one already detects the masterful interplay of architecture, ceremony, and light that would cement his reputation among British patrons, such as the Duke of Bedford.
The Ascension Day festival—the Sposalizio del Mare—was the Venetian Republic at its most theatrical. Each year, on the fortieth day after Easter, the Doge would sail the Bucintoro, a gilded ceremonial galley, to the Lido to cast a symbolic ring into the sea, marrying Venice to its maritime dominion. The vessel portrayed here is the final iteration, constructed at the Arsenale and embellished by Antonio Corradini with allegorical flourishes: Justice, Saint Mark’s lion, and golden heraldry.
Canaletto places the scene in the heart of the Bacino, the grand aquatic antechamber to Venice, beloved by Grand Tourists arriving by sea. The composition is dynamically anchored: Punta della Dogana to the left, the Molo receding to the right, the Campanile rising behind the ornate Gothic bulk of the Palazzo Ducale. Below, the lagoon dances with gondolas and festivity; the Bucintoro—red, gold, imperial—takes its place among them with supreme command.
Light pervades the surface. The painting has a clarity suggestive of a cloudless early summer morning, with dabs of vermilion punctuating the crowd and brilliant whites flicked across parasols and gondolier caps. Water ripples in luminous arcs. The human figures—economical in line yet vibrantly alive—are resolved with a brisk, assured touch that avoids the miniature while still evoking individuality.
Despite their liveliness, these passages are tightly orchestrated. Canaletto’s precision is legendary—he inscribed architecture with incising tools and straight edges, as seen in the arcade of the Palazzo delle Prigioni. Such rigour was paired with invention: while he used a camera obscura, he often distorted or corrected the lens’s view to achieve a more visually intuitive result, heightening theatrical effect without forsaking architectural coherence.
This compositional alchemy was hardly spontaneous. The Cagnola Sketchbook—138 pages of studies, notes, and perspective drafts—bears witness to his careful assembly of such panoramic marvels. He called his loose drawings “scaraboti” (scribbles), but they formed the armature for his monumental scenes. Though unafraid to manipulate topography, he always managed to anchor his work in a recognisable, convincing reality.
In the 1730s, Canaletto dominated the market for vedute, largely thanks to the efforts of Joseph Smith, the British Consul in Venice, who was a tireless promoter of his work. This painting likely arrived in England under Smith’s guidance, perhaps even via Sir Robert’s son Edward, who spent 1730-31 in Venice on a buying mission. In Downing Street, the Bucintoro painting hung as part of a pendant pair flanking a fireplace—its companion being a Grand Canal view from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto.
The room’s picture hang was intentional and telling: Solimena, Castiglione, Teniers—Old Masters flanking the modern Venetian marvel. Here, among power and art, the Canaletto took pride of place in what was then called the ‘North East Corner Room.’ Its resonance lay not only in its mastery but in its subject. For the Whig elite, Venice—the aristocratic Republic where the Doge’s power was strictly curtailed—offered a flattering analogue to their constitutional vision.
This ideological undercurrent deepened its appeal. Walpole’s Canaletto was no idle souvenir; it was a symbol of stability, civic ceremony, and enlightened rule. So potent was this symbolic freight that a web of intermarried Whig families—Richmond, Devonshire, Bedford, Newcastle—would each acquire similar works, threading Canaletto’s Venice through the heart of eighteenth-century British political taste.
By the time George Walpole sold the picture in 1751, its pedigree was secure. Purchased at auction by the financier Samson Gideon through the East India Company director Jones Raymond, the painting entered a new chapter. Gideon—an outsider turned City powerbroker—sought social legitimacy via culture, acquiring Belvedere House in Kent and furnishing it with only “the greatest masters.” The Bucintoro found itself at the centre again.