Pirna seen from the right bank of the Elbe

Bellotto's view of Pirna seen from the right bank of the Elbe, painted in 1756 and now in the San Diego Museum of Art, belongs to his most celebrated series from the Dresden period — the Pirna vedute that documented the picturesque Saxon market town upstream from the electoral capital. The 1756 date coincides with the opening of the Seven Years' War, during which Saxony was occupied by Frederick the Great's Prussian forces and Bellotto's Dresden court patronage was disrupted. The view from the right bank gives Bellotto a wide riverscape with Pirna's church and medieval houses reflected in the Elbe, a compositional type he had developed through extensive topographic work in the Dresden environs. The San Diego Museum of Art's holding makes this one of the most significant Bellotto works in western American collections.

The canvas uses the Elbe's broad surface as a foreground compositional element, its reflective quality allowing Bellotto to double the architectural content of the scene through its inverted reflection. The right bank's eye-level viewpoint gives the composition an intimate, observer-placed character different from the more elevated viewpoints of some Dresden panoramas. Pirna's Gothic church tower and medieval roofscape are rendered with the architectural precision of Bellotto's finest vedute.