The Frick owns two works by the eighteenth-century Venetian painter Francesco Guardi. The first represents the regatta, an annual boat race that takes place on Venice’s Grand Canal. The painter seems to be looking at the competition from a window of Ca’ Foscari, the palazzo of the Foscari family, but this view was actually based on a painting or a print by Canaletto. The second painting is a view of the Cannaregio, Venice’s second-widest canal, looking northwest toward the Ponte dei Tre Archi (Bridge of the Three Arches). Included is a depiction of Palazzo Surian Bellotto, in the eighteenth century the residence of the French ambassador in Venice. Canaletto’s pictures were in demand both locally and by elite clients and foreign visitors who wanted a souvenir of Venice. The pictures were exact, precise, and topographically reliable. Guardi’s views, by contrast, were not very accurate but more vivacious.

Guardi’s pictures were appreciated by a small number of patrons, one of whom was John Strange, the British minister to Venice from 1773 to 1788, who acquired both the paintings now on view at the Frick. Although in private Strange lamented Guardi’s inaccuracies, in public he praised him as “a painter still living at Venice; and who, though he has taken to Canaletto’s department, has still followed a particular manner; which is spirited and quite his own.”