From 1716 to 1718 the young Canaletto worked together with his father Bernardo Canal and an uncle on stage sets for operas by Antonio Vivaldi. Shortly thereafter he travelled to Rome to paint under his father’s guidance scenery for operas by Alessandro Scarlatti. Canaletto however soon abandoned the theatre life and started painting views, both real and imaginary. Around 1725 he collaborated with Giovanni Battista Piazetta and Giovanni Battista Cimaroli on a capriccio view. But he also set himself at painting realistic views. By 1725 he seems to have been already very much in demand as a painter of Venetian vedute. The 1730s proved the most prolific part of his career. Canaletto’s Venetian townscapes found an eager and buying public in the English nobles, who visiting Venice on their Grand Tour of course wished a memento of their journey. The early 1740s brought about a dramatic change in his output. The outbreak of the Austrian Succession War (1741) deprived the artist of much of his English patronage and he almost entirely gave up painting, devoting himself instead to drawing and etching. Canaletto’s intensified activity as an etcher coincided with the great revival of etching to which contributed such masters as Tiepolo, Piazetta and Michele Giovanni Marieschi. In 1746 the artist moved to London as the artistic climate was declining in Venice. He remained in England until 1755. This period was not a highly productive one for only forty pictures with English subject matter are recorded. It is however possible that he continued to produce drawings of Venetian and Roman views. Her spent he last decade of his life in Venice. His last dated work is from two years before his death and bears an inscription of his own hand stating that he realized this picture at the age of 68 ‘without spectacles’.