File:A prospect of Greenwich Hospital from the River RMG PY8381.tiff

This drawing, almost certainly by Rigaud, was used as the basis of an engraving which he made and published in Paris in 1736 (see PAI7092), itself a pair to a view in the opposite direction, from the Observatory (see PAI7091). Canaletto closely used the print from this drawing as the basis for his earliest surviving painting of Greenwich Hospital, circa 1746, (private collection, on loan to Tate Britain) probably before he ever saw Greenwich himself. The overall design and some of the detail also influenced his more famous oil of about 1752 in the NMM collection (BHC1827), though that takes a slightly lower viewpoint and was in part based on his own knowledge of the site.

This drawing and the related print only have slight differences themselves, but both show a number of architectural variations from the actual buildings. The strange half-wall and step arrangements below the dome pavilions, which also appear on other prints, are examples. The domes also lack the drums above the columns and their inset clock and wind-dials - an error common to Rigaud's and both Canaletto's views. The Queen Mary court in the left background here also has to be largely imaginary, since construction only began in 1735, and the Observatory is quite wrongly shown as an Italianate palazzo lost amid trees, suggesting Rigaud may himself not have known the site well but worked from other prints. He was, however, invited to England by the landscape architect Charles Bridgeman and recorded the gardens at Stowe in Buckinghamshire.