Cityscape Paintings

Cityscape is a form of landscape, and has been a part of art since the Renaissance. Examples of cityscape can be found in the major painterly movements. The Italian Baroque artist Canaletto (1697-1768) painted cityscapes of Venice collected by young English aristocrats on their Grand Tour visit to display when they returned home. Collectors prize paintings by Canaletto and his followers, which are valuable on the market today.

In the 19th century, the French Impressionists included cityscape or portions of it in their paintings. Claude Monet (1840-1926) painted the Houses of Parliament in serial. During the Industrial Revolution, suburbs formed a union between city and country. Georges Seurat demonstrates the union of cityscape and country landscape with his "Bathers at Asnières," 1884, showing petite bourgeois swimmers in the foreground with factories belching smoke in the background.

In America, artists in the Ashcan School of the early 1900s returned to an earlier political realist style as they painted cityscapes of New York. Their paintings of ground-level workday life captured the public imagination and documented a bygone era in the city.

Quick Facts

• The market for Canaletto paintings may have cooled since the recession
• On July 7, 2005, Sotheby’s London sold Canaletto’s "Venice, the Grand Canal," c. 1724, for £18.6 million
• On December 4, 2013, a pair of Canaletto paintings, "Venice," c. 1738-9, sold for £9.6 million