The Grand Canal in Venice from Palazzo Flangini to Campo San Marcuola

By the late 1730s, Venice had become a required stop on the Grand Tour, and Englishmen went home wanting proof they had been there. Canaletto supplied it. This view up the Grand Canal, near the mouth of the Cannaregio, was the kind of souvenir they paid well for, and it likely passed through Joseph Smith, the British merchant in Venice who acted as the painter's agent. What lifts it above a postcard is Canaletto's honesty about the place. He was at the height of his powers, and he painted the palaces as they actually stood: sun on the water, but also the soot and crumbling stucco streaking the facades. The composition sold well enough that he repeated it. Other versions hang in Minneapolis and the Wallace Collection in London, and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto made an enlarged copy of it soon after.