Until 8 January 2023, the Royal Castle in Warsaw is hosting the exhibition “Bernardo Bellotto. On the 300th anniversary of the painter’s birth”. It was created in collaboration with the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen-Gemäldegalerie in Dresden. This is the first exhibition to present Bellotto’s oeuvre in such a comprehensive manner in Poland. It features paintings, prints and drawings that are most characteristic of particular periods of Canaletto’s work.

The exhibition was divided into three parts. The first consists of works from his youth spent in Venice and from his travels to other Italian cities: Florence, Milan, Rome and Verona. The other is devoted to the artist’s stay in Dresden, where he worked for the Wettin court for more than twenty years – with a break when he had to seek employment in Vienna and Munich after the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in Europe. Finally, the exhibition will show last period of the painter’s life and work in Warsaw, where the artist worked for King Stanislaw August and representatives of the aristocracy.

In the Royal Castle in Warsaw, in a room designed to the order of the Polish king, a set of 22 vedutas of Warsaw and its surroundings can still be admired today, constituting the largest existing series of Bellotto paintings.

“What is on display at the Royal Castle in Warsaw is impressive. You can see large-format paintings, beautiful cityscapes, because Bellotto was a painter who specialised in cityscapes, architecture. It is really worth coming to this exhibition”, stressed Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Culture Piotr Gliński at its opening.

The exhibition includes works by Bernard Bellotto from the National Gallery and British Museum in London, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the J.P. Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Manchester Gallery of Art, the Museo Capodimonte in Naples, the Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco in Milan, the Musei Reali in Turin and the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.

Adrian Andrzejewski