Canaletto

Canaletto made his name painting Venice so precisely that art historians can still identify the exact building, the exact angle of light, in many of his views of the city. Born Giovanni Antonio Canal in 1697, the son of a theatrical scene painter, he started out designing sets for operas, including some by Antonio Vivaldi, the Venetian composer, before turning to the cityscapes that made him famous.

He worked for years through a British art dealer named Joseph Smith, who sold his views of the Grand Canal and its palazzi almost entirely to English aristocrats on the Grand Tour, the extended European trip wealthy young Britons took as a rite of passage. That market pulled Canaletto to London himself in the 1740s, where he spent nearly a decade painting English views in the same crisp, sunlit style.

He returned to Venice, was elected to the city's painters' academy in 1763, and kept working until his death there in 1768.