The building works at Woburn Abbey may be tiresome for the inmates, but they’ve been useful for the rest of us, enabling the Duke of Bedford’s private art collection to go on tour. The National Maritime Museum has got most of that collection in the Queen’s House; now, downstairs in the main museum we have the marvellous group of 24 Canalettos painted for Lord John Russell, then the future Duke of Bedford, in 1731, perhaps the lucky painter’s largest ever commission.
Normally they hang in the Dining Room at Woburn – even with smaller canvases stacked three high, it must be quite a space – and before that in London, in Bedford House. They are, essentially, very much glorified picture postcards, images of the Venice that Lord John visited on the Grand Tour; on rainy days at Woburn the Duke could look at the lovely blue skies of Venice and remember his youth.
