Giovanni Antonio Canal (18 October 1697 – 19 April 1768),[1] commonly known as Canaletto (Italian: [kanaˈletto][2]), was an Italian painter from the Republic of Venice, considered an important member of the 18th-century Venetian school.

Painter of city views or vedute, of Venice, Rome, and London, he also painted imaginary views (referred to as capricci), although the demarcation in his works between the real and the imaginary is never quite clearcut.[3] He was further an important printmaker using the etching technique. In the period from 1746 to 1756 he worked in England where he painted many views of London and other sites including Warwick Castle and Alnwick Castle.[4] He was highly successful in England, thanks to the British merchant and connoisseur Joseph “Consul” Smith, whose large collection of Canaletto’s works was sold to King George III in 1762.[3]
Much of Canaletto’s early artwork was painted “from nature”, differing from the then customary practice of completing paintings in the studio. Some of his later works do revert to this custom, as suggested by the tendency for distant figures to be painted as blobs of colour – an effect possibly produced by using a camera obscura, which blurs farther-away objects – although research by art historians working for the Royal Collection in the United Kingdom has shown Canaletto almost never used a camera obscura.[10]

However, his paintings are always notable for their accuracy: he recorded the seasonal submerging of Venice in water and ice.[11]