Footnotes

• Provenance:
  Private collection, UK.
  
  The present lot is one of a number of magnificent panoramas of Venice which Nerly produced in the early 1840s. Born Christian Friedrich Nehrlich in Erfurt in Germany, the artist was raised by relatives in Hamburg, following the death of his father. In the artistic milieu of Hamburg, Nerly soon became the protégé of the artist, writer and patron Baron Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, who encouraged the young artist’s talent for observing nature. In 1827, patron and pupil undertook extensive travels throughout Germany, and during a visit to Wiemar, Nerly made the acquaintance of Goethe. The following year saw Nerly’s first trip to Italy, where he was to spend six years in Rome, working within a well-established community of German artists, which included Johann Christian Reinhart, Friedrich Preller and Erwin Speckter. Nerly’s landscape studies of Rome and the surrounding areas, as well as of Naples and Southern Italy, were much admired by his peers, and rate among the best of German realistic landscape art of the period.
  
  Nerly settled in Venice in 1835 and soon Italianised his name. He set up a studio in the Palazzo Pisani, near the Campo San Stefano, and soon gained a reputation as one of the finest vedute painters of the age, producing numerous views of the city, which were in high demand among educated travellers. He frequently produced multiple versions of compositions, including thirty-six views of the Piazzetta.
  
  In the present lot we see how Nerly’s realist tendencies give way to a more Romantic depiction of the glory of Venice. The artist has positioned himself so as to include several of the city’s most famous landmarks. In the distance, we see the sunset behind the domes of Santa Maria della Salute, beside which stands the Punta della Dogana and the entrance to the Grand Canal; to the right, along the Riva degli Schiavoni, stands the Doge’s palace, behind which we see the Campanile; on the Molo, at the entrance to the Piazzetta San Marco, stand the columns of Marco and Todaro, beyond which we see the Biblioteca Marciana.
  
  Following his death in 1878, the remains of Nerly’s artistic estate were gifted to the city of his birth, where it is now housed by the Angermuseum.
  
  For similar compositions see Fischer Auctioneers, 18 November 1994, lot 2060; Neumeister Kunstauktionen, 27 September 2000, lot 737; Sotheby’s London, 15 June 2004, lot 8, Sotheby’s London, 16 November, 2004, lot 298, Christie’s London, 15 June 2005, lot 83.
  
  Literature:
  Romanticism and Nature, exhibition catalogue, Daxter & Marschall, Munich, and Thomas le Claire, Hamburg, 2004, p.46.

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Category: Fine Art / 19th Century Paintings

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