View of Canale di Santa Chiara, Venice

The boat in the middle of the canal, the long one with the decorated cabin, ran to a timetable. A burchiello was rowed and towed up the Brenta to Padua and back, and it was how a good many travellers arrived from the mainland, which made this stretch of water their first sight of the city. Canaletto was painting almost entirely for those travellers, most of them British on the Grand Tour, through Joseph Smith, an English merchant living in Venice who acted as his agent and eventually sold his whole collection to King George III. Smith had this view engraved by Antonio Visentini for a printed series that worked as a sales catalogue back home. The wall on the left belongs to the Corpus Domini convent. The religious houses along this canal were shut under Napoleon's rule after 1806, and their ground was gradually cleared for what is now Piazzale Roma, where the buses and cars stop.