Capriccio: A Sluice on a River with a Chapel

Look at the small stone on top of the bridge, the keystone over the arch. Canaletto lettered his initials and the date into it, A.C. 1754. The scene itself is a capriccio, an invented view, a sluice on a river beside a chapel, and he painted it in England, where he was living that year. It is one of a set of seven such inventions that may have been meant to decorate a single house, probably ordered by Thomas King, 5th Baron King, for his seat at Ockham in Surrey. The pictures stayed with his descendants for nearly two centuries. His great-grandson William King became the 1st Earl of Lovelace, and in 1835 he married Ada Byron, the mathematician remembered as Ada Lovelace, so this canvas belonged to the household she married into. The family sold it in 1937. The following year it was bought by Princess Mary, the daughter of King George V, and it went to Harewood House in Yorkshire.