Canaletto's England
Harriet Berry shows how the Venetian artist, Canaletto, who first came to England in 1746, was to give the English a new and lasting image of their land.
Before the seventeenth century, the face of England is only dimly glimpsed. It is strange that the country which produced such a dense historical work as the Domesday Book should offer so few visual clues to its past. It is veiled, not by the mists of legend, but by lack of illustration.
A few lines and wrinkles are suggested by early topographers. In Pynson's Cronycle of Englande of 1510 there is an engraving 'of London': a decorative and symbolic scheme rather than a view. Certain Tudor drawings, mostly by the Flemish, were more evocative. A view from Southwark, for instance, by Anthony Van den Wyngaerde, grouped together all the important buildings of the skyline rather in the manner of an inventory.
But it was not until the arrival of the Bohemian artist, Wenceslaus Hollar, in 1636 that a tradition of realistic topographical art was born. With his sophisticated drawings and etchings of the English scene the face begins to emerge. With the paintings of Jan Siberechts and, later, John and Robert Griffier, its features fall into place, becoming recognisable if not entirely natural to the twentieth-century eye.
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