La façade sud du château de Warwick

Canaletto came to London in 1746 because his market had collapsed. The War of the Austrian Succession was keeping the English off the Grand Tour, the Venetian views he lived on had stopped selling, and so he followed his customers home. One of them, Francis Greville, Lord Brooke, owned Warwick Castle and ordered five canvases and three drawings of it, the largest group Canaletto ever gave a single building in England. Greville was 29 and busy turning a medieval fortress into a country seat. Lancelot Brown started on the grounds the following year, and the meadow under the walls stopped being somewhere the town could walk. The south front is taken from below and across the Avon, a cliff of masonry with small figures set along the bank for scale.