Badminton Park from Badminton House

Canaletto painted Badminton Park during his extended English sojourn between 1746 and 1755, when the decline of the Grand Tour trade following the War of Austrian Succession had driven him to seek patronage directly in Britain. Badminton House in Gloucestershire was the seat of the Duke of Beaufort, one of his most important English patrons, and he made several views of the house and its parkland that belong to a coherent commission. These English country house views are among the most interesting works of his English period—he had to adapt his urban veduta technique to the rolling English landscape and the Palladian country house tradition, producing images quite different from his Venetian canals.

The English landscape setting required Canaletto to develop a different compositional approach from his Venetian canal scenes—the horizontal sweep of the park, the English grey-blue sky, and the irregular tree masses replacing his characteristic water foregrounds and palace façades. He uses a high, broad viewpoint to take in the house's situation within the parkland, rendering the trees with more atmospheric softness than his Italian foliage. The architecture is still given his characteristic crisp precision.