English Castles

In England, Canaletto mostly painted London, but he also turned to country estates such as Warwick Castle. In 1748, Lord Brooke commissioned him to depict his ancestral seat while it underwent architectural improvements. Canaletto shows the castle with new windows, reshaped gardens, and the Avon transformed into a canal-like river with a gondola. Transposing his Venetian idiom to the English countryside, he turns a medieval fortress into a vision of Georgian elegance. Despite such prominent commissions however, Canaletto struggled financially. He returned to Venice in 1755, and when he died in 1768, he had little to his name—in contrast to his nephew Bellotto, whose court career provided him, at least temporarily, with a regular salary, a security Canaletto never had.