The River Thames with St. Paul's Cathedral on Lord Mayor's Day

Canaletto had spent some 20 years painting Venice for British visitors on the Grand Tour. When the War of the Austrian Succession cut those visitors off and they stopped coming, he followed them home, reaching London in May 1746. This is what he made there, the Thames on Lord Mayor's Day, the river procession that marked the swearing in of a new Lord Mayor, with St Paul's, finished only 35 years earlier, standing over the rooftops. Ferdinand Philipp, the 6th Prince Lobkowicz, met the painter while travelling in London and carried the picture back to Bohemia along with a companion view looking upriver towards Westminster. He kept it in his bedroom.