London: Old & New

Canaletto closely observed London’s changing cityscape. Depicting Old London Bridge shortly before its demolition, he carefully captured a notorious bottleneck made up of medieval houses. He would have known how this outdated structure inspired plans for Westminster Bridge, built further upstream in 1739–50. With classicizing forms and grand arches, it was the first new bridge over the Thames in six centuries—a feat of modern engineering that Canaletto celebrates in a drawing also shown here. A dialogue between past and progress likewise shapes his view of Westminster Abbey, the coronation site and burial church of English monarchs. Newly crowned with neo-Gothic towers, the Abbey forms a dramatic backdrop for the procession of the Order of the Bath, a medieval chivalric order re-established in 1725.