Francesco Guardi

Francesco Guardi was an Italian painter and one of the last great masters of the Venetian view. Born in Venice in 1712, he painted scenes of his home city, its canals, squares, and festivals, in a looser, more atmospheric style than his famous rival Canaletto. Rather than crisp precision, Guardi offered shimmering light, flickering brushwork, and a sense of air and movement.

His views feel almost dreamlike, with tiny figures dabbed in quickly and skies full of drifting clouds. In his own time he was less commercially successful than the more polished view painters, but later admirers came to prize exactly his freedom and sparkle. Guardi's poetic, luminous scenes of Venice are now treasured as a bridge toward more modern ways of painting.