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The Stonemason's Yard

The Stonemason's Yard is an early oil painting by Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto. It depicts an informal scene in Venice, looking over a temporary stonemason's yard in the Campo San Vidal set up for the construction of Andrea Tirali's facade of the church of San Vidal, and across the Grand Canal towards the church of Santa Maria della Carità. Painted in the mid to late 1720s, it is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London and is considered one of Canaletto's finest works.

Description
The painting measures . Canaletto painted ''The Stonemason's Yard'' before 1730 while Prussian blue was discovered by Johann Jacob Diesbach in 1704. Amongst other pigments used by Canaletto in this painting were Naples yellow, lead white and ochres. The informal scene is thought to have been painted for a Venetian patron, rather than a foreign visitor to Venice, in the mid- to late 1720s. ==Provenance==
Provenance
The early ownership of ''The Stonemason's Yard'' is not known. It was in the collection of Sir George Beaumont by 1808, and was one of the paintings Beaumont donated to the British Museum in 1823, to form the nucleus of the National Gallery's nascent collection. It passed to the National Gallery in 1828, where it continues to be exhibited. It was extensively cleaned by John Seguier in 1852 – so extensively that a Select Committee investigated the cleaning practices of the National Gallery – and was cleaned again in 1955, and then restored, relined and remounted in 1989. Some early retouchings, clouds now concealed under later glazings, may have been done in Beaumont's time by John Constable. ==See also==
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