The Grand Canal, Venice, Looking South toward the Rialto Bridge, c.1730/40 Giovanni Antonio Canal Canaletto (1697-1768)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Giovanni Antonio Canal Canaletto also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting The Grand Canal, Venice, Looking South toward the Rialto Bridge is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

Midday air sits lightly over the Grand Canal, and the water holds that unmistakable Venetian green – part jade, part seawater, part reflected stone. A gondola slides past in the near foreground, its black hull cutting a clean, confident curve. Beside it, small figures loiter on the left bank; you can almost hear the soft knock of wood on wood, oarlocks and mooring posts, a little harbour music.

Canaletto gives you Venice as a measured pleasure. The city stretches out in a long, calm recession toward the Rialto, with façades set like stage flats but never dead. Windows blink open and shut in repeated rhythms; chimneys and rooflines make a low, fussy skyline against a milky cerulean. Yet it’s the light that does the social work here. Sun strikes the buildings from the left, warming plaster into pinkish terracotta and pale butter-cream, while the right side stays cooler, more reserved. Those tonal shifts keep the architecture from turning into mere diagram.

Look closely at the water and you catch a painter’s little bravura: thin horizontal strokes, laid almost like shorthand, skim across the surface to suggest ripples and the drag of boats. Near the boats’ shadows, the green deepens, and tiny dabs of white pick out broken reflections. It’s careful, yes, but never fussed. One might imagine Canaletto working like a composer, repeating motifs – prow, pole, oar, mast – and varying them just enough to keep the eye alert.

These views were often conceived in sets, and this one has that satisfying feeling of a page in a larger album: a record for travellers, especially English clients, wanting Venice in orderly installments. Still, accuracy isn’t Canaletto’s only loyalty. He will nudge a viewpoint, widen a space, or square a façade to let a building present itself properly. That gentle manipulation is part of the charm. It’s Venice, certainly – and also Venice made legible.

If you know Guardi’s later, fluttering Venice, this is the earlier mood: steadier, sunlit, confidently descriptive. Standing before The Grand Canal, Venice, Looking South toward the Rialto Bridge at the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York USA, one feels not drama but assurance – a city agreeing, for a moment, to be understood.