The National Maritime Museum has taken advantage of the temporary closure of the Duke of Bedford’s stately home of Woburn Abbey to host this major display of Woburn’s collection of scenes of Venice and its waterways by Italian artist Canaletto. The twenty-four paintings, commissioned in 1731 by the 4th Duke of Bedford during his Grand Tour, have hung in the Woburn Abbey dining room for over two hundred years, and has not previously been on public view in London.
Unsurprisingly, given the museum’s maritime focus, the exhibition pays particular attention to the boating and water-based dimension of Venetian life depicted in the artist’s work. However, by supplementing the paintings with other objects from the museum collections at Greenwich, and contextualising the art with an accompanying investigation of the twin challenges of rising sea levels and mass tourism via cruise ships, the exhibition also highlights the modern-day threats posed to the city depicted in the artwork.
See the National Maritime Museums' 