Miodowa Street

This was painted in 1777. It shows a perspective of this busy route at the time, as seen from the junction with Senatorska Street. The painter recreated the facades of buildings located at Miodowa Street in great detail: on the left the Palace of the Cracow Bishops, the Palace of Peter Fergusson Tepper (no longer standing today), the banker of King Stanisław August, and the Church of the Capuchins; on the right we see the residence of the Branicki family. The silhouette of the baroque Krasiński Palace closes the street perspective.
Before they returned to their place after the Castle’s reconstruction, the fate of Bellotto’s outstanding works was rather turbulent. Four paintings from the collection were exported to Versailles on the order of Napoleon in 1807; they returned to Warsaw thirteen years later. In 1832, after the failure of the November Uprising, all 22 paintings were looted by the Russians; most were taken to Petersburg, one to Moscow. They were returned to the Castle only in 1920 after Poland regained its independence. The Nazis later abducted all the canvases to the Reich. They were found after the war by the Recovery Committee and moved to the National Museum in Warsaw. They were then exhibited there for many years in waiting for the Castle to be rebuilt. The great value of Canaletto’s views, apart from being faithful representations of the architecture of Warsaw from that period, lies in how they depict the life of the capital’s streets, carriages, trade stalls, the costumes of the visitors and the city’s inhabitants.