ART
Old Masters at Tooth's and Agnew's Galleries
THERE has always been a tendency to include within the same breath the names of Canaletto and Guardi, and to place Canaletto first as being the superior. Nothing, in my view, is further from the truth, and this month the galleries have gathered their forces to demonstrate the error, and the Bond Street environs are filled with pictures of canals and campaniles. Guardi triumphantly leads the field, with Canaletto a poor second and all other gondoliers unplaced.
Tooth's is exhibiting a " Fete of the Bucentaur," by Guardi, newly discovered and a work of the utmost importance. This picture is a masterpiece of such splendour and vitality that its first appearance in London might well inspire a pilgrimage even from San Marco to Bruton Street. No one should miss seeing it. Two Canalettos, also of Venice, hang in the same gallery and have the good grice to look ashamed of themselves. They are slick, metallic, they lack any breath of air, and though both of them possess a certain grandeur of composition, they are a dead topography where the Guardi palpi- tates with glittering life.
An interesting comparison may be made of the treatment of the figure in the work of these- two painters. In the case of Canaletto the figure is a lay one, a prop, generally added to the canvas after the completion of the carefully ruled architectural drawing, so that today one can see a flight of steps through thinly painted breeches or a portico through a three-cornered hat. Painted smoothly with a loaded brush, the pose is generally static. The reverse is true of Guardi, whose figures are vital components and well aware of the fact. The brush-stroke is rapid and small with heavy chiaroscuro, the posing Baroque and vigorous.
Also at Tooth's is a small painting by Magnasco, a curious painter full of.sound and fury, who also used a form of Baroque impression- ism combined with heavy chiaroscuro, and predicts Fuseli's melo- dramatic lighting and choice of subject. Other interesting pictures in this exhibition are a small landscape by the little-known Flemish painter Coninxloo, a late follower of Patenir and something of an innovator, and a charming Watteauesque " Music Party " by J. J. Horemans which, though it is placid where Watteau would be feverish and stolid where Watteau would be light as air, has about it a gentle and nostalgic melancholy approaching the master. The Coninxloo is a very small picture of a very large vista with that remote and pervading green quality to be found in Patenir and the distances of Breughel, full of clustering houses, mountains, busy peasants and marvellous trees, all creating a curiously submarine sensation.
At Agnew's one is back on the canal in no less than seven pictures, including an enormous Bellotto as large as it is dull, and two Guardis, one the size of a postcard, as small indeed as it is exquisite. There is also a fine Ribera of Galileo, a pleasant Ruysdael, a flashy Rubens and a Palma Vechio so weak that if removed from the frame it
could be decanted into a bucket. MICHAEL AYRTON.
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