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Afternoon sunlight pours over a town crowded along the banks of a serene, glass-green river that runs through the middle of this horizontal painting. Several buildings cluster to our left on the riverbank close to us. A gateway there opens onto a bridge or walkway that extends back and behind the buildings. Tiny in scale, people stand, sit, or ride singly or in small groups on the dirt road that spans the lower edge of the composition. One man sits on a bench in a fenced-in, grassy enclosure at the lower right, and another man there wears monk’s robes and holds a basket. The land must dip down steeply between the dirt road and riverbank, for a few rooftops nestled in there have chimneys at road level. Houses, churches, and grand structures line the far riverbank and fill in the town beyond. Many of the buildings are white or tan with dark red roofs, though others are brown or gray. Trees and an open green space are tucked among the structures. A pale blue sky with wispy, petal-pink and light tan clouds fills the top half of the composition.

Bernardo Bellotto and Workshop

View of Munich, c. 1761

West Building, Main Floor - Gallery 30

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 69.2 x 119.8 cm (27 1/4 x 47 3/16 in.)

framed: 86.4 x 137.2 x 8.9 cm (34 x 54 x 3 1/2 in.)

Credit Line

Samuel H. Kress Collection

Accession Number

1961.9.64

Artists / Makers

Bernardo Bellotto (painter) Venetian, 1722 - 1780

Italian 18th Century (painter)

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
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Provenance

Private collection, Saxony.[1] Possibly (Sabin, London); sold 1928 to (Karl Haberstock, Berlin), possibly until 1936.[2] Acquired by Dr. Gustav Mez [d. 1944], Rorschacherberg, Switzerland;[3] (Rosenberg and Stiebel, New York); purchased 1951 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[4] gift 1961 to NGA.

[1] A photograph of the painting in the Witt Library, London, is inscribed with the information that the painting was once in the collection of Augustus III, elector of Saxony (see photocopy in NGA curatorial files.)

[2] Karl Haberstock appears to have handled two Bellotto views of Munich: the Gallery version and one that was sold to the Sonderauftrag Linz, processed through the Munich Central Collecting Point (no. 7573) in 1945, transferred in 1949 to the German government, and sent to the Auswärtig Amt in 1962 (see photocopies from the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, in NGA curatorial files). This other version, first published by Andrzej Rottermund in 1998 (see bibliography), was auctioned by Koller International Auctions in Zurich on 1 October 2021. One of the two Bellottos was acquired by Haberstock from Sabin in London in April 1928 (see photocopies from Haberstock-archiv in NGA curatorial files), and at least one was still in his possession as of 1936, per Hellmuth Allwill Fritzsche, Bernardo Bellotto, genannt Canaletto, Burg-bei-Magdeburg, 1936: 116.

[3] According to Saemy Rosenberg (letter of 7 December 1955, to NGA curator Fern Rusk Shapley, in NGA curatorial files), the painting was acquired by a private collector from a Dresden collection during World War II. Stefan Kozakiewicz, in his 1972 catalogue raisonné, identified the collector as Gustav Mez, a German resident in Switzerland (see bibliography). It is possible that both this painting and its companion (NGA 1961.9.63) were acquired by Mez from Haberstock in 1929, when the third painting of the group (replicas of the originals in the electoral palace painted for Elector Maximilian III Joseph) was sold.

[4] See The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/2438.

Associated Names

Haberstock, Karl
Kress Foundation, Samuel H.
Mez, Gustav, Dr.
Private Collection, Saxony
Stiebel, Ltd.

Exhibition History

1956: Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1956, no. 8.

1990: Bernardo Bellotto: Verona e la città europee, Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona, 1990, no. 45.

1996: Obras Maestras de la National Gallery of Art de Washington, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City, 1996-1997, unnumbered catalogue, 78-79, color repro.

Technical Summary

The support is an open, plain-weave fabric of medium to coarse weight. The ground appears to be a warm, gray-brown layer with large pigment particles. It was apparently applied with brushes or tools that left arc-shaped or parallel strokes in the ground layer. A brown imprimatura layer appears beneath the paint in the lower part of the painting, but not in the sky. The oil paint is granular with large pigment particles and was applied relatively thickly with the topmost layers exhibiting a rather high impasto and rich body. Black underdrawing is visible with a stereomicroscope in some areas, such as small windows, where it was not covered by the paint. Incised lines were used occasionally to define the outlines of the buildings. These lines are very random and do not seem to have been used for a full-scale laying in of the perspective or forms.

The painting was lined during a treatment by William Suhr in 1951. The tacking margins have been removed, but rather strong cusping along the left and right sides suggests that the painting has not been reduced in width. X-radiographs reveal an extensive loss at the lower-left side, suggesting that the child and dog seen in the original version in Munich were once present in this work, but were removed early in its history. The sky has been heavily inpainted, presumably to compensate for heavy abrasion. The varnish is moderately yellowed. Examination under ultraviolet light suggests that the painting has been inpainted at least twice.

Bibliography

1936: Fritzche, Hellmuth Allwill. Bernardo Bellotto, genannt Canaletto. Burg-bei-Magdeburg, 1936: 116, no. VG 116.

1956: Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection Acquired by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation 1951-56. Introduction by John Walker, text by William E. Suida and Fern Rusk Shapley. National Gallery of Art. Washington, 1956: 32-34, no. 8, repro.

1959: Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 257, repro.

1960: The National Gallery of Art and Its Collections. Foreword by Perry B. Cott and notes by Otto Stelzer. National Gallery of Art, Washington (undated, 1960s): 6, as by Bernardo Bellotto.

1963: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. New York, 1963 (reprinted 1964 in French, German, and Spanish): 318, repro.

1965: Kozakiewicz, Stefan. "Un pittore quasi sconosciuto, Lorenzo Bellotto, figlio di Bernardo e una serie bellottiana di vedute di Roma." In Venezia e la Polonia nei secoli dal XVII al XIX. Edited by Luigi Cini. Venice, 1965: 98.

1965: Pallucchini, Rodolfo. "L'arte del Bellotto." In Venezia e la Polonia nei secoli dal XVII al XIX. Edited by Luigi Cini. Venice, 1965: 79, fig. 43.

1965: Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 13.

1968: National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 6, repro.

1972: Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, Mass., 1972: 24.

1972: Kozakiewicz, Stefan. Bernardo Bellotto. Translated by Mary Whittall. 2 vols. Greenwich, Connecticut, 1972: 2:233, no. 291, repro. 230.

1973: Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XVI-XVIII Century. London, 1973: 167-168, fig. 320.

1974: Camesasca, Ettore. L'opera completa del Bellotto. Milan, 1974: 107, no. 167, repro. 106.

1975: European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 24, repro.

1979: Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1979: 1:60-61; 2:pl. 35.

1984: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 350, no. 490, color repro., as by Bernardo Bellotto.

1985: European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 44, repro.

1990: Bellotto: Verona e le città europee. Exh. cat. Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona, 1990: 156-161, no. 45.

1991: Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen: Alte Pinakothek. Venezianische Gemälde des 18. Jahrhunderts. Edited by Rolf Kultzen and Matthias Reuss. Munich, 1991: 29.

1996: De Grazia, Diane, and Eric Garberson, with Edgar Peters Bowron, Peter M. Lukehart, and Mitchell Merling. Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1996: 19-22, repro. 21.

1998: Rottermund, Andrzej. "Bernardo Bellotto's Unknown View of Munich," Artibus et historiae 38 (1998): 9, 10, fig. 2, 19 n. 4.