The Stonemason’s Yard

The Stonemason’s Yard breaks with the majestic canal views Canaletto is best known for, showing instead a crowded working lane of Venice where masons chip stone in the foreground by the church of San Vidal. It is regarded as one of the loosest and most appealing of his early views, its concern as much with ordinary working life as with architectural pageantry. Painted in the later 1720s, it casts the brilliant daylight that the Venetian view-painter would carry into his later, more celebrated topographical canvases, and is today a treasured hold of the National Gallery in London.