Introducing MFAH Favorites: Brandon Zech on Canaletto

In a basement bathroom at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), I overheard two men talking: “That’s the problem. When I lived in Chicago, I never went to the Sears Tower. I had to have someone coming in from out of town in order to go.” 

“Yeah.” 

“Same thing in Dallas — I never went to the Sixth Floor Museum unless someone was visiting me; you take it for granted when it’s just there.”

When you have anything at your fingertips — world-class or otherwise — you run the risk of becoming complacent. I’d like to believe that if I lived in New York I would visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art once a week just to marvel at its vastness, but in reality I know that having the breadth of humanity’s artistic achievements at my fingertips could shockingly easily become old hat. 

This sentiment is applicable to anything each of us considers local — our institutions, restaurants, friends, et al. If we’re lucky, senses of wonder manifest in waves; something is new and exciting, becomes overly familiar, and then is ignored, until the time when it is rediscovered for its yet-unseen (or, more likely, forgotten) fantasticness. So goes the relationship that many art-involved people have with their hometown museums. 

Galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2024

Last month, for the first time in years, I ran a full circuit of the MFAH. The museum’s 2020 addition of a new building, which is choc-a-block with modern and contemporary work, made this a formidable task. While visiting sections of the museum I hadn’t seen in years, a well of appreciation and awe sprung up from somewhere deep in my bones. Whether true or not, the museum seemed livelier than I had remembered; red, blue, and purple walls abounded, and many of the permanent collection presentations were sharp and fresh. 

I was brought back to the first time I visited the museum, when I was an impressionable kid fresh out of a high school art history course. Walking through the MFAH’s halls, I sensed that even though the museum didn’t own the pieces that defined art history, the collection exuded the essence of why art is valuable to our society and to us as a people. 

Since then, after going to college in Houston and working for nine years at Glasstire, the museum has become rote memory. Walking through the collection is like visiting old friends, and any redesign of the museum’s core sections is both a reinvigoration (a friend getting a new haircut and either going corporate or punk, depending on perception) and a loss of something that has made up our mutual history. 

A long-term relationship breeds contradictions and occasional contention. The depth of my affection for the museum means that I expect a lot back from it — not personally, but as an institution that is the torchbearer for Houston’s artistic community. Many others invested in the city’s art scene feel the same, which is why sometimes, when they believe the museum has made a misstep, they speak out, either in Glasstire’s pages or elsewhere. Our collective investment in the museum, along with our belief in what it is and what it can be, is why we choose to engage with it so deeply. 

With that said, I’m pleased to introduce this series, which we’ll be running for the next few months. In celebration of the MFAH’s 100th birthday this year, we’re publishing a collection of short essays in which people from the Houston community write about their favorite work in the museum’s collection. (A digression: it is remarkable in itself that the MFAH was founded — by a forward-thinking group of women — all the way back in 1924, making it the oldest art museum in Texas.)

What we’re asking these writers to do is neither fair nor logical; I myself, only when pressed, could manage to narrow down what to write about. And even then, had I decided 30 seconds later, I easily could have picked another piece. The museum’s collection runs deep and hits differently for everyone. From prodigious paintings such as J. M. W. Turner’s Sheerness as seen from the Nore, to sensuous scenes by Joachim Wtewael and Claude Monet, to museum standouts of pre-Columbian, African, Indian, and Asian works, to Bayou Bend and Rienzi, the MFAH’s offsite locations, to the unquantifiable and ever-growing modern and contemporary collection, to everything else in between, the museum’s offerings are incomprehensibly vast. 

I’m thrilled to see the artworks our contributors pull out of the woodwork. And while it would’ve been all too easy for me to select a delicate piece of silver or a small painting on ivory, I’ve instead chosen a classic, which since my first visit has been a favorite. 

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Canaletto, “The Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice,” c. 1730, oil on canvas, 19 1/2 x 29 inches. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Robert Lee Blaffer Memorial Collection, gift of Sarah Campbell Blaffer

Is there anything better than Canaletto’s views of Venice? The scenes he painted are intrinsically alive, dotted with little dibs and dabs of paint that, from a distance, come together to form full-fledged narratives composed of archetypes of people going about daily life in a far-famed place that is just as much myth as it is reality. 

Instead of transporting you to the city, Canaletto’s paintings transport the city to you. His pictures look like photographs; they’re moments frozen in time and so realistic that it’s as if Venice has been shrunken down, embedded into the wall, paused, and framed. Unlike the subjects of allegorical myths or biblical scenes which we think to dominate history painting, Canaletto worked in the here and now (or, rather, the there and then). Many of his pieces, just like this one, were modestly sized so they could be easily transported as souvenirs of the Grand Tour, the coming-of-age trip for the aristocratic 18th century European elite. 

Part of the ubiquity of Canaletto’s works is out of his control: Venice, as the city on the lagoon, is a recognizable landmark and is so frozen in time that many of its vistas still look as they did in the painter’s day. But his works are also timeless because he knew exactly what he was doing by creating takeaway memories from the city. The aristocratic tourism of his time prefigured the carnival of people that today regularly pours into Piazza San Marco. (Adjacent to this painting, the MFAH has long displayed an equally stunning Canaletto work from a private collection depicting Saint Mark’s Square. A plea to whomever owns this piece: please consider donating it to the museum, so that we can forever visit not only the Grand Canal, but also the Piazza.) 

Gallery 209 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Audrey Jones Beck Building features three paintings by Canaletto — two, at right, in the museum’s permanent collection, and one, on the left, on loan from a private collection

If memory serves, I encountered this painting on my first-ever visit to the MFAH. Canaletto had been a favorite during my high school art history course, and I was also preparing to travel to Venice. I remember standing in the gallery enthralled, not only by the chance to see one of Canaletto’s pieces in person, but also by the fact that something so foreign was able to touch me in such a deep way. I felt a kinship to the painting, which made no immediate sense because I am neither Venetian nor a Grand Tourist. 

And still, this is Canaletto’s enduring power. By rendering this scene of the Grand Canal in such a real way, he gives it a specificity and a sense of place as a way to ground the viewer’s interaction with the painting. With this comes an inextricable appeal to pathos; you become invested in all of the individual narratives unfolding that make up the whole of life in a city. This picture is a model for what great art can do: no matter when or in what context it was made, it has an ability to speak to us in whatever present we’re coming from, to reach out and communicate some intangible idea about life and the things that make us human.

Canaletto’s The Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice is on view in gallery 209 in the MFAH’s Audrey Jones Beck Building.