London: The Thames from Somerset House Terrace towards the City

Canaletto came to London in May 1746. The war on the continent had thinned out the Grand Tour traffic that kept him busy in Venice, so he followed his customers home and stayed for most of the next nine years. This looks downstream from the terrace of the old Somerset House, the royal palace that stood on the site long before the building there now. Demolition of it began in 1775. St Paul's, finished in 1709, rises over the City, and the steeples around it belong to the churches Wren rebuilt after the fire of 1666. The canvas and the reddish ground under the paint are Venetian, which is why the picture is dated to about 1750 or 1751, when Canaletto went home for a spell and worked his London drawings up there. Joseph Smith, the British consul in Venice and his oldest patron, took it with its companion view towards Westminster, and Smith's collection passed to George III in 1762.