The River Thames Looking Towards Westminster from Lambeth

Canaletto arrived in London in May 1746, after the war on the Continent had thinned out the English visitors who bought his views of Venice. The city he found had a new landmark. Westminster Bridge, begun in 1739, was the first bridge in central London since the medieval London Bridge, and here it runs across the Thames on its long row of stone arches, even though it would not open to traffic until 1750. The view is taken from Lambeth, with the red-brick buildings of Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury's residence, on the right, and Westminster Abbey across the water on the left. A young Bohemian nobleman, Prince Ferdinand Philipp Lobkowicz, met Canaletto in London and brought the picture home. During the Second World War it was taken on Hitler's orders to a salt-mine depot in Austria, and today it hangs in the Lobkowicz Palace at Prague Castle.