An etching of the landing place for boats at Mestre on the Venetian mainland. The building on the left in the foreground has Canaletto's chevron coat-of-arms. The area around the canal is filled with many figures and a wagon. Second state, Bromberg 3. Inscribed below: A. Canal f. and: Mestre. Sheet has wide, untrimmed margins. A related drawing is RCIN 907490, and another impression is RCIN 807834.

Canaletto and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto began to experiment with etching in the early 1740s, an enterprise that has often been attributed to the decline in visitors to Venice and commissions following the War of Austrian Succession. Many of Canaletto's prints take their subject matter from the locks, sluice gates and summerhouses along the Brenta Canal towards Padua; others are entirely imaginary. Canaletto made just thirty-three etchings in total, etched on plates of two different sizes (about 30 x 42cm and 14 x 21cm), several prints include titles, but only one is dated, to 1741. Thirty-one of the prints were published together some time after 1744 as Vedute alle prese da i luoghi altre ideate (Views, some taken from nature, others imaginary). The titleplate is dedicated to ‘Signor Giuseppe Smith, Console di S. M. Britanico’, who was appointed to the position of Consul that year; the set was probably issued before the artist left for England in 1746. Smith possibly commissioned and financed Canaletto’s experiments. Many of the Canaletto etchings in the Print Room at Windsor are second and third states and were probably acquired in the twentieth century. Identifiable by the traces of gold from the wash line borders with which they were once surrounded in Smith's Canaletto album, only a handful of prints definitely belonged to Smith, including several rare and unique impressions. This print was not pasted into the album previously containing Dürer prints and is probably a later acquisition.

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