Often, book publishers engaged Turner and other top landscape watercolorists to work up the perfunctory travel sketches of others in order to endow the engravings made from them with some flair and to confer celebrity on the project.

Though Turner had not yet been to Italy in 1818, the author James Hakewill employed him to make watercolors from Hakewill's own pencil sketches  for his Picturesque Tour of Italy.

Hakewill made his sketch from the window of his hotel looking along the Grand Canal to the landmark Rialto Bridge.