The New Town Market Square with St. Kazimierz Church

This 1778 view of Warsaw's New Town Market Square with the Church of St Kazimierz belongs to the comprehensive series of Warsaw vedute that Bellotto produced for Stanisław August Poniatowski across the final fifteen years of his life. The New Town Market Square, outside Warsaw's medieval fortifications in the suburb that grew up north of the Old Town, centred on the Church of St Kazimierz — a baroque convent church built for the Benedictine Sisters of the Holy Sacrament as a votive offering following the Polish victory over the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683. Bellotto's record of this square — now held in the Royal Castle in Warsaw — provided precise documentation of both the church and the surrounding townhouses that was used in post-war reconstruction.

The canvas deploys Bellotto's standard Warsaw veduta technique: a precise perspectival framework for the church and square architecture over which loose, atmospheric figures and sky are applied. The church's baroque dome and facades are rendered with architectural specificity while the market square is animated by the market-day figures and activities that give Bellotto's Warsaw views their social texture alongside their topographic value.