- Museum number
- 1958,0712.443
- Description
-
Venice, the Grand Canal, looking towards the Dogana. c.1840
Watercolour
- Production date
- 1840 (circa)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 221 millimetres
-
Width: 320 millimetres
- Curator's comments
- Ref: C. Reginald Grundy, 'The Beecham Collection III Works by Turner', Connoisseur, XXXVIII, April 1914, p. 233, repr. p. 231.
The following entry is taken from K.Sloan, 'Turner watercolours in the Lloyd Bequest', BM exh. cat.1998
Venice held a special fascination for Turner, as for so many other artists, and his watercolours and oils of the city have a magical quality which has received more universal acclaim than perhaps any other aspect of his work. He made his third and last visit to Venice in 1840, staying for fourteen days at the end of August and basing himself at the Hotel Europa. Even on this third visit he was still so completely engrossed in capturing the nuances of the city's atmosphere and light that the artist William Callow recorded being made to feel guilty by the older man's unflagging labours: "One evening whilst I was enjoying a cigar in a gondola I saw in another one Turner sketching San Giorgio, brilliantly lit up by the setting sun. I felt quite ashamed of myself idling away the time whilst he was hard at work so late."¹
Most of Turner's watercolours of Venice remained in his studio, and are now to be found in his sketchbooks and colour beginnings in the Turner Bequest at the Tate Gallery. He may have hoped that the the result of his 1840 tour would be commissions for large finished works like his late Swiss watercolours of Zurich and Lucerne (see 1958,0712.445-446) but, apart from one possible commission from the Ruskins,² these were not forthcoming. Instead, over two dozen sheets were removed from the sketchbooks and sold to Turner's patrons, probably by his dealer at the time, Thomas Griffith. At least six (from TB CCCXV) were purchased by John Ruskin. One characteristic common to nearly all his late Venetian watercolours is the use of red tones to make objects stand out and blues to make them recede, creating a sense of depth with the minimum of detail. Some previous writers have suggested that the red lines which sketch the architecture in this work and others were drawn by the artist with pen and ink; a close examination, however, shows that some may have been drawn with pen dipped in watercolour,³ while others could have been made with the finest of brushes, as one would expect from an artist who from a fairly early stage seldom relied upon pencil or pen to indicate architectural details.
Turner's viewpoint was probably from the steps of S. Maria della Salute, but the misty campanile of S. Marco and the even paler ghosts of gondolas floating across the foreground make it seem unlikely that it was completely finished on the spot.
1. Autobiography, quoted in BM 1985 (98).
2. See Warrell 1995, pp. 96-7.
3. See ibid., p. 45.
One of the views similar to this one, that were removed from the sketchbooks by Thomas Griffith, remained in his family and was sold at Christie's, London 10 July 2014 (see special separate catalogue, in dossier on the present drawing).
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1909, Agnew's, no.168
1924, Agnew's, no.24
1934, RA, no.897 (778)
1959, 1960, BM
1966 Feb, BM, Turner Lloyd Bequest, no.35
1969 Feb, BM, Turner Lloyd Bequest, no.35
1975 BM, Turner in the BM, no.259
1985, BM, British Landscape Watercolours 1600-1860, no.98
1998 May-Sept., BM, J.M.W.Turner: Lloyd Bequest, no.45
- Acquisition date
- 1958
- Acquisition notes
- UNDER THE TERMS OF THE BEQUEST, NONE OF THE PRINTS OR DRAWINGS BEQUEATHED BY R. W. LLOYD MAY BE LENT OUTSIDE THE BRITISH MUSEUM (Registration Numbers 1958,0712.318 to 3149).
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1958,0712.443
