London: Northumberland House

By 1752 the man painting this London street corner was a long way from home. Canaletto had built his name on views of Venice, sold mostly to wealthy young Englishmen on the Grand Tour. When war spread across Europe in the 1740s and those travellers stopped coming to him, he did the practical thing and followed his customers to London, arriving in 1746. Here he turned his eye on the Strand near Charing Cross and on the great Jacobean pile of Northumberland House that stood there. He fills the foreground with the ordinary traffic of the city, the carriages, the walkers, the street sellers going about an afternoon. The house itself was pulled down in 1874 to widen the road, so this careful record is now one of the closest looks we have at a London corner that no longer exists.