Bernardo Bellotto

Bernardo Bellotto learned his trade in the Venice workshop of his uncle, the famous view-painter Canaletto, and even carried the uncle's nickname abroad, signing himself Canaletto in places where no one knew the difference. His own eye was cooler and more silvery, his skies heavier.

He never went home. Courts to the north wanted painted views of their capitals, and Bellotto obliged, working for years in Dresden, then Vienna and Munich, and finally for the king of Poland in Warsaw. He recorded streets, palaces, and churches with an almost surveyor's precision, down to the shop signs and the cracks in the plaster.

That precision had an afterlife he could not have imagined. When much of old Warsaw was deliberately destroyed in the Second World War, his detailed views of the city were taken down off museum walls and used as working documents by the architects who rebuilt it. He died in Warsaw in 1780, court painter to a country that would later lean on his pictures to remember how it had looked.