The Venetian veduta painter Canaletto, whose works were particularly popular among Anglo-Saxon travellers to Italy, spent a number of years in England in the mid eighteenth century. The landscape motifs he sketched there served as the basis for paintings and independent drawings executed in the artist’s unmistakable style. This drawing, elaborately developed with pen and brush and signed on the back, thus unites various London sights (for example Westminster Bridge, completed in 1746) in a “capriccio” – a freely invented but realistic-looking composition – reminiscent of Venice in depiction and light effects.