View of Santa Maria della Salute, from the entrance of the Great Canal

Canaletto was about 30 when he painted this view across the water to Santa Maria della Salute, working on a sheet of copper rather than canvas, at a time when British travellers on the Grand Tour were the steadiest buyers of Venetian views. What happened to the picture later is better documented than who ordered it. By the 1930s it belonged to Bernhard Altmann, a Viennese manufacturer of cashmere knitwear, and in 1938, after Germany annexed Austria and Altmann had fled to London, German officers took four Canalettos from him. Strasbourg's fine-arts museum bought this one on the open market in 1987, knowing none of that. In 2005 the city negotiated with Altmann's heirs and paid them about 2.5 million euros to keep it. It is a small painting, 45 by 60 centimetres, with the church of the Redentore far off at the left.