View of Warsaw from the Praga Bank
Bernardo Bellotto, called Canaletto (1722 to 1780) · 1770
The whole city lies before you across the river. From the low bank of Praga on the east side of the Vistula, Bellotto looks back at Warsaw on its escarpment: the long roof and tower of the Royal Castle, the spires of the Old Town churches, the palaces strung along the ridge to the south and, on the right, the raft bridge and the timber yards along the shore. In the foreground peasants and ferrymen go about their day, a carriage waits, and cattle stand in the shallows. It is the largest painting in the room and the one to which every visitor returns.
Look at the sky, which takes up more than half of the canvas. Bellotto gives it great banks of cloud lit from the west, so that the city catches the afternoon sun while the near bank lies in shadow. The perspective is so exact that historians can identify almost every building, including some that vanished long before the war. Notice the ferry crowded with passengers in the middle of the river, and the tiny figures on the castle terrace. The painter signed the picture with his adopted name, de Canaletto, and dated it seventeen seventy, three years after his arrival.
The view is a document of a city about to lose its independence: two years later the first partition took a third of Poland's territory. It is also a picture of a river that has hardly changed, since the Vistula at Warsaw is still wide, wild and unembanked on the Praga side. If you walk down to the river after your visit and look back at the castle from the east bank, you will find that Bellotto's composition is still there, with the reconstructed castle standing exactly where he painted it.
Did You Know? Bellotto painted the view three years after arriving in Warsaw, and the river bank he stood on looks much the same today.
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