The city's aristocrats bought every canvas the Venetian painted, but London's artists were not impressed.  Joshua Reynolds, intent on igniting a "grand style" of British painting within a disenfranchised generation of English artists, wanted none of Canaletto's "imitation," brushing off the entire Venetian school in 1759 as "the Dutch part of Italian genius."[i]  Reynolds, like art historians soon to come, didn't see the poetics of depiction that attended to the "petty peculiarities" of "literal truth and a minute exactness in the details"[ii]—pictures content to describe the world precisely as one commonly thinks it appears to the eye.  "It may appear strange," Reynolds argued,

…to hear this sense of the rule [Imitate Nature] disputed; but it must be considered, that if the excellency of a Painter consisted only in this kind of imitation, Painting must lose its rank, and be no longer considered as a liberal art, and sister to Poetry: this imitation being merely mechanical, in which the slowest intellect is always sure to succeed best; for the Painter of genius cannot stoop to drudgery, in which the understanding has no part; and what pretence has the Art to claim kindred with Poetry, but by its power over the imagination?[iii]

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[i] Reynolds, Joshua.  "To the Idler," no. 79 (Saturday, 20 October 1759, originally in the magazine Universal Chronicle), reprinted in The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds.  H.G. Bohn: London, 1846, p. 129-30.

[ii] C.f. Reynolds, "To the Idler," no. 79, p. 127.

[iii] C.f. Reynolds, "To the Idler," no. 79, p. 127.