Veduta di Burano

At the centre of this small, simple painting, running perfectly parallel to the base, is a gondola on a Venetian canal. In the background are the run-down houses of the island of Burano, which at that time was still, inhabited entirely by artisans. The small canvas is without extraneous elements, only the little De Pisis chooses to paint there: the still rarefied air of a sunny day, a Venice recently rediscovered. He had returned to the city as if to an ancestral home, becoming the proud owner of a house (“la bella casa”, often mentioned in his diary), on which he spared no expense.
Even more than the work of Guardi and the eighteenth-century Venetian landscape painters it was perhaps his new lifestyle that led De Pisis – especially given the current interest in his work – to revive the swift, lively style he had developed in Paris and later in London in the 1930s. It was this “shorthand” that enabled him to achieve his aim of completing “a picture a day”, not only for himself but also for the growing queue of collectors and dealers. This painting was completed in 1947 – one of de Pisis’s last peaceful years, as soon afterwards his days were plagued by a debilitating nervous disorder.