The above engraving of Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canale) was completed by Antonio Visentini, circa 1735. Canaletto was a son of the scene-painter Bernardo Canale. He worked as a scene-painter in his father's workshop in Rome in 1719 and was influenced by Panini. About 1720, he turned to the painting of views and concentrated on this for the rest of his life and became perhaps the most famous view-painter of the 18th century. His progenitors as "veduta" (city view) painters were Luca Antonio Carlevaris and the Dutch born Jaspar van Wittel (a.k.a. Vanvitelli), but Canaletto's superiority over them was recognized early by his contemporaries. His views of his native city were intended for export. He acquired a large clientele in England through the Irish impresario Owen MacSwiny and Joseph Smith, a merchant resident in Venice who became British Consul in 1744. Smith's own collection of 54 paintings and over 140 drawings was sold to King George III, and many are still in the Royal Art Collection at Windsor. In 1745, partly as a result of the War of the Austrian Succession, which made travel difficult for his patrons, Canaletto went to England. He lived mainly there until 1755, painting many views of the Thames and its bridges, of Whitehall, and of a number of country houses including Warwick Castle and Badminton. All his works employ linear perspective, which is used not only as an illusionistic device, but as a means to aesthetic order. He often employs wide-angle or birds-eye views with several vanishing points; the perspective is handled so as to control the way the painting is seen, leading the eye on a structured voyage of exploration through its complex spaces ("camera obscura"). His Venetian views are very varied, moving from the enclosed irregular spaces of the smaller Venetian "campi" to wide panoramas of the Grand Canal and the Bacino du San Marco. In the careful distribution of accents across the surface they show a sense of interval which is classical and very satisfying, but this is combined with a feeling for extended effects of air and atmosphere which is essentially Rococo, comparable with Tiepolo's style. Canaletto's early works favor picturesque effects of surface and texture. Some of his greatest paintings of this period have open and Corotesque brushwork, evoking effects of light comparable to early Impressionism. He returned and lived in Venice some time after 1755, until his death in 1768.