Lot 49 D α

The biography and artistic development of Friedrich Nerly are defined by the combination of his German origins — he was born Christian Friedrich Nehrlich into a family of musicians in Erfurt—and his Italian adopted homeland. At the age of just twenty-one, the artist was drawn to Italy — first to Rome and Milan, and in 1837 he finally settled in Venice, at the very heart of the motif that would henceforth become the central theme of his atmospheric views.
Nerly’s vedute of the lagoon city were highly sought after by collectors throughout Europe and, alongside those of English painters such as Richard Parkes Bonington and William Turner, helped shape the nineteenth-century image of Venice. While Nerly’s meticulous attention to detail recalls the vedute of Canaletto painted a century earlier, his art is distinguished above all by its atmospheric rendering of a picturesque, idealized Venice. Everyday scenes and figures of contemporary life rarely appear in Nerly’s Venetian views in oil; he preferred figures dressed in historical costumes, mostly inspired by the Renaissance, which he studied with great precision.
All the more charming, therefore, is the small scene in the lower right corner of the present painting: a lady in a blue dress with a fan leans on her companion as he leads her toward a gondola landing. She turns back once more toward a fruit seller, who sits offering her wares. The composition, showing the Grand Canal with a view of Santa Maria della Salute, is likely among Nerly’s earliest Venetian vedute. A version of this composition in the Kunsthalle Bremen is dated to 1838/39, the first years of his stay in the Lagoon City (fig. 1; oil on canvas, 67.5 × 86 cm, inv. no. 381-1947/5). This slightly smaller painting appears almost as a continuation of the present work: the young couple has now reached the gondola, and the two little dogs still frolic along the quay; only the fruit seller has disappeared.
Another version, now bathed in evening light, is held by the Städel Museum in Frankfurt (fig. 2; oil on canvas, 74.5 × 106 cm, inv. no. 1173). Here, the young couple has vanished, while the fruit seller has reappeared. All three versions likely go back to a watercolour by Nerly depicting the scene in clear daylight (Erfurt, Angermuseum, inv. no. 3026). Nerly often used such a watercolour as the starting point for his oil views, in which he would then explore different light effects.
At the centre of the composition, though at some distance, stands the magnificent church of Santa Maria della Salute, designed by Baldassare Longhena in the seventeenth century. From the viewer’s standpoint, the gaze extends across the Grand Canal toward the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti, built in the sixteenth century.