The Grand Canal, Venice, Italy, Looking towards Santa Maria degli Scalzi and Santa Lucia

This late view of the Grand Canal looking toward Santa Maria degli Scalzi and Santa Lucia, painted around 1789, shows Guardi in his final years working from the same stretch of the Grand Canal's northern bank that he had depicted many times across his career. By 1789, the painter was seventy-seven years old and had been producing vedute for over three decades. His handling in these late works shows an increasing dissolution of architectural solids into light and atmosphere, the buildings flickering and shimmering with a proto-Impressionist freedom that contemporaries sometimes found too sketchy. The church of Santa Lucia visible in this composition was demolished in 1861 to build the railway station that now bears its name, giving Guardi's painting inadvertent documentary significance as a record of a building that no longer exists. The Wilson in Cheltenham holds this as part of its collection of eighteenth-century art assembled during the town's Regency period of cultural aspiration.

Guardi's distinctive flickering brushwork captures the movement of water and the play of light on Venetian facades. Unlike Canaletto's precise architectural rendering, Guardi favors atmospheric suggestion over topographical accuracy.