Francesco Zuccarelli

By the 1730s Venice was the last great stop on the Grand Tour, and the young Englishmen arriving there wanted pictures to carry home. Francesco Zuccarelli, born in the Tuscan hill town of Pitigliano and trained in Rome, gave them exactly what they wanted: gentle pastoral country, shepherds and washerwomen by a stream, hills going soft blue in the distance. The British consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, who was already selling Canaletto's views to the same buyers, took him up.

When Canaletto crossed to London to be nearer that market, Zuccarelli followed, in 1752. His Arcadian scenes sold so well there that he stayed for years, went home, then came back again. In 1768, when a group of artists founded the Royal Academy of Arts under George III, Zuccarelli was among the names on the list, one of the few Italians there.

He returned to Italy for good in the 1770s and was elected president of the Venetian Academy. The taste he had fed did not outlast him long. Within a generation his soft blue distances looked old-fashioned beside the harder Neoclassical line. Many of his landscapes still hang at Windsor, bought by George III together with the rest of Consul Smith's collection.