The Grand Canal

When I first saw Canaletto's paintings in the National Gallery, like A Regatta on the Grand Canal, I was interested in their vivid detail but dismayed by the way the water was painted.  It wasn't just that the little white waves looked so unrealistic in comparison to the buildings and figures - something stylised to suggest that Venice is a kind of giant stage set might have been appropriate.  It was more that they seemed to have been slapped on in an almost childish manner, as if all that work on the rest of the painting had been spoiled by an artist who had left the water to last and not really known how to deal with it. 

 Canaletto, A Regatta on the Grand Canal (detail), c. 1740

Occasionally in childhood you carry the conviction that something which is supposed to be admirable is flawed, and it is satisfying to find out later that your original intuition was probably correct.  John Ruskin thought these waves monotonous, but in Modern Painters (vol. 2, 1846), he also took Canaletto to task for the way he dealt with reflection, breaking one of the rules for painting water outlined in the book.  Here is what Ruskin wrote, and I have included below an example of a painting that I think illustrates his point.

Among all the pictures of Canaletto, which I have ever seen, and they are not a few, I remember but one or two where there is any variation from one method of treatment of the water. He almost always covers the whole space of it with one monotonous ripple, composed of a coat of well-chosen, but perfectly opaque and smooth sea-green, covered with a certain number, I cannot state the exact average, but it varies from three hundred and fifty to four hundred and upwards, according to the extent of canvas to be covered, of white concave touches, which are very properly symbolical of ripple.

And, as the canal retires back from the eye, he very geometrically diminishes the size of his ripples, until he arrives at an even field of apparently smooth water. By our sixth rule, this rippling water as it retires should show more and more of the reflection of the sky above it, and less and less of that of objects beyond it, until, at two or three hundred yards down the canal, the whole field of water should be one even grey or blue, the colour of the sky receiving no reflections whatever of other objects. What does Canaletto do? Exactly in proportion as he retires, he displays more and more of the reflection of objects, and less and less of the sky, until, three hundred yards away, all the houses are reflected as clear and sharp as in a quiet lake.

Canaletto, The Grand Canal, 

Looking North-East from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge, c. 1724

This, again, is wilful and inexcusable violation of truth, of which the reason, as in the last case, is the painter's consciousness of weakness. It is one of the most difficult things in the world to express the light reflection of the blue sky on a distant ripple, and to make the eye understand the cause of the colour, and the motion of the apparently smooth water, especially where there are buildings above to be reflected, for the eye never understands the want of the reflection. But it is the easiest and most agreeable thing in the world to give the inverted image: it occupies a vast space of otherwise troublesome distance in the simplest way possible, and is understood by the eye at once. Hence Canaletto is glad, as any other inferior workman would be, not to say obliged, to give the reflections in the distance. But when he comes up close to the spectator, he finds the smooth surface just as troublesome near, as the ripple would have been far off. It is a very nervous thing for an ignorant artist to have a great space of vacant smooth water to deal with, close to him, too far down to take reflections from buildings, and yet which must be made to look flat and retiring and transparent. Canaletto, with his sea-green, did not at all feel himself equal to anything of this kind, and had therefore no resource but in the white touches above described, which occupy the alarming space without any troublesome necessity for knowledge or invention, and supply by their gradual diminution some means of expressing retirement of surface. It is easily understood, therefore, why he should adopt this system, which is just what any awkward workman would naturally cling to, trusting to the inaccuracy of observation of the public to secure him from detection.