Vaprio d'Adda

A small group of well-dressed figures gathers on the riverbank in the lower right corner, chatting near the water while a woman in a pink skirt sits among them. Just beyond, a lone boatman poles his way along the calm Adda river, and across the water a town climbs the hillside, its pale villas and towers catching the last light under a heavy, cloud-filled sky. This is Vaprio d'Adda, a town northeast of Milan, painted by Bernardo Bellotto, an 18th-century Italian view painter and the nephew of the more famous Canaletto.

Bellotto trained in his uncle's Venice workshop and learned the same careful, almost photographic way of recording cities and landscapes. He even used the family name Canaletto himself when he traveled, which has caused centuries of confusion about who painted what. What sets Bellotto apart is his mood. His skies tend to be darker and more brooding than his uncle's, and here the stormy grey clouds pressing down on the bright buildings give the scene a real sense of weather about to turn. The bare, twisting tree on the right edge frames the whole view and adds to that feeling of a day on the edge of rain.