The story
In 1746 Canaletto, the Venetian painter of canals and regattas, arrived in London. War in Europe had thinned the stream of British travellers buying his views in Venice, so he followed them home. One of his keenest patrons was Sir Hugh Smithson, who had married the Percy heiress and would become the first Duke of Northumberland. The Percys ordered eight paintings from him, and in the state rooms of Alnwick Castle you can see his Windsor Castle of 1747 and his Syon House of 1749, the family's house on the Thames near Brentford.
The castle around them is far older. The Percys have held Alnwick, in Northumberland near the Scottish border, since 1309, and from outside it still looks like a medieval fortress. Its outer courtyard stood in for Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films. Inside is another world. In the 1850s Algernon, the 4th Duke, had the state rooms remade in the style of an Italian Renaissance palace, and in 1856 he bought 74 paintings in Rome, the Camuccini collection, to hang in them. That is how a Northumbrian castle came to hold Venetian pictures by Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo and Palma Vecchio, and Roman ones by Andrea del Sarto and Guido Reni. In the Saloon stand two cabinets by Domenico Cucci, made for Louis XIV at Versailles.
The family portraits carry their own politics. Anthony van Dyck, court painter to Charles I, painted Algernon Percy, the 10th Earl, around 1638, the year he was made Lord High Admiral of the king's fleet. A few years later the same Earl sided with Parliament against the king in the Civil War.
