The story
Two of Canaletto's London pictures hang in a Warwickshire country house. The Venetian painter came to England in 1746 looking for patrons, and around 1751 he painted the Grand Walk at Vauxhall Gardens, the fashionable pleasure ground on the south bank of the Thames. Beside it is his view inside the Rotunda at Ranelagh in Chelsea, the great round hall where Londoners paid to hear concerts and promenade.
The house around them is Compton Verney, home of the Verney family for nearly five centuries. In the 1760s the 14th Baron Willoughby de Broke brought in the architect Robert Adam to remodel it, and the park was shaped by the landscape designer Capability Brown. The family sold the estate in 1921, and after a string of owners the mansion fell derelict. In 1993 the foundation of Peter Moores, heir to the Littlewoods business, bought it and spent about £45 million turning it into a gallery, which opened in 2004.
Today it shows six collections, from Chinese bronzes to British folk art. In the portrait rooms hangs Joshua Reynolds's picture of Jane Baldwin, a merchant's wife born in Smyrna, today's Izmir, wearing Turkish dress. Reynolds asked her to sit without any commission, and he kept the canvas in his studio until he died.
