Charles Beddington is a dealer and agent in Old Master Paintings, based on Savile Row, London, offering paintings from a broad range of periods and schools, with a leaning towards the 18th Century, and a particular speciality in Venetian view painting.
He was at Christie’s 1983–1998, ultimately as head of the London Old Master Picture Department. In 1998 he started Charles Beddington Ltd, which has been based at 16 Savile Row since 2001.
Charles is widely regarded as the pre-eminent ‘expert’ on Eighteenth Century Venetian view painting, and on Canaletto in particular. He frequently contributes articles and reviews to, as well as exhibition catalogues, and reference books, the subjects of which include Neapolitan and Venetian view painting.
As well as contributing articles to The Burlington Magazine and the Colnaghi Studies Journal, Charles has curated and written the catalogue for several exhibitions, notably Canaletto in England: A Venetian Artist abroad 1746-1755 at the Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, and Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2006–2007, and Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals, National Gallery, London, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2010–2011. He also wrote the catalogue of the exhibition Luca Carlevarijs: Views of Venice, Timken Museum of Art, San Diego, 2001, co-curated Pietro Bellotti, un altro Canaletto, Ca’Rezzonico, Venice, 2013–2014, and co-curated Canaletto e Venezia, Palazzo Ducale, Venice, 2019. He wrote the book accompanying the exhibition Canaletto: Painting Venice, The Woburn Series, Holburne Museum, Bath, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum, 2021–2022, and most recently coauthored Canaletto and Guardi, Views of Venice at the Wallace Collection in 2025.
Giovanni Battista TIEPOLO
(Venice 1696-1770 Madrid)
A Young Woman in Renaissance Costume
Oil on canvas
28 x 21 in. (71 x 53,3 cm)
Provenance
– (Possibly) Tsarina Elizaveta Petrovna (1709-1762)
– The painting
– Private Collection, Switzerland.
Literature
D. Ton, ‘Le “mezze figure di donne a capriccio” di Giambattista Tiepolo per Elisabetta Petrovna: una nuova proposta’, Arte Veneta, 81, 2024, pp. 119-25, figs. 1 and 11 (colour, before cleaning).
Publishing this painting in 2024, Denis Ton points out that it almost certainly formed part of a series and that, in its half-length format, its colour scheme, composition and style, it is very closely to the Young Woman with a Macaw in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which is of identical size (C. Whistler, Baroque & Later Paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, London, 2016, pp. 365-71, no. 121, illustrated in colour).
One of Tiepolo’s most celebrated works, the red plumage of the bird perched on the young woman’s arm is mirrored here in the red plumes that adorn the model’s rakish velvet beret. Two other works in the same vein, A Young Woman as Flora (sold at Christie’s, London, 2 December 2008, lot 40, £2,841,250) and A Young Woman with a Mandolin (Detroit Institute of Arts), are slightly larger. A stronger candidate for the series, A Young Woman wrapped in a Fur, has also been proposed, but is only known from a pastel copy by Lorenzo Tiepolo, paired with a pastel after the Ashmolean painting (both Kress Collection, K150 and K151 in the El Paso Museum).
Denis Ton relates this and the Ashmolean painting to a passage in a letter from F.M. Tassi to the Count Carrara di Bergamo, dated 15 December 1760, describing a series of half-length beauties which painted for the Empress Elizabeth of Russia (1709-1762):
[Il Tiepolo] ora sta facendo alcune mezze figure di donne a capriccio per l’Imperatrice de Moscovia, che non si possono vedere cose più belle, più vive e più fine. [Tiepolo is now working on some half-length female figures a capriccio for the Empress of Russia; one could not find anything more beautiful, more vivacious or more refined.]
There has been much scholarly discussion about the possible identification of the models in these fantasy portraits.
That with the most poetic resonance is the tentative suggestion, put forward by various scholars, that the sitter in the Ashmolean picture, and by extension in the present painting given the similarities in their features and the distinctive widow’s peak hairline, is one of Giambattista’s daughters, Angela Maria. Speaking of Tiepolo’s daughters in a group portrait of the Tiepolo family by Giandomenico Tiepolo (formerly Mentmore, Rosebery Collection, sold Sotheby’s, 8 July 2015, lot 22), Michael Levey muses, ‘It is hard not to recognise in the girls the models, or at least the types, which had served for several of Tiepolo’s women [including] the “fancy pictures” destined for Russia’ (M. Levey, Giambattista Tiepolo, New Haven and London, 1986, p. 251).
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