Francesco Guardi

Bio

Francesco Guardi’s career as a view painter, for which he is principally remembered today, was only the second stage in a long working life which began as the junior partner, with his elder brother Gian Antonio, in an enterprise turning out a vast range of religious and historical subjects, flower paintings, battle scenes and genre subjects. Their compositions were not particularly original, and Francesco’s own work is hard to distinguish from that of his brother, thirteen years his senior and clearly the dominant partner, although an attempt to do so has been made recently. It was not until a year after Gian Antonio’s death in 1760 that Francesco Guardi’s name was inscribed in the Fraglia of Venetian painters, but as a painter of views rather than history subjects, so we may assume that the two brothers had established their own specialities before the elder’s death. Francesco did not entirely abandon figure painting after his brother’s death, as is evidenced by a somewhat disappointing altarpiece from 1777 , which indicates that he was well advised to dedicate his principal efforts to the production of veduti.