J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > First Italian Tour 1819-20 > Milan to Venice Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Studies of Venice from the Bacino and Canale di San Marco, with the Setting Sun 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Studies of Venice from the Bacino and Canale di San Marco, with the Setting Sun’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 50 Verso:
Studies of Venice from the Bacino and Canale di San Marco, with the Setting Sun 1819
D14410
Turner Bequest CLXXV 50a
Pencil on white wove paper, 112 x 185 mm
Partial watermark ‘lee | 13’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Finberg subsequently annotated his 1909 Inventory entry (‘Sketches on the Canale di S. Marco’): ‘S. Giorgio, Citella [sic], & Doge’s Palace. Two sketches’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy: ‘Panorama from gondola’.2 Bell added the same phrase to Finberg’s entry in his 1930 In Venice with Turner (‘Two sketches in the Basin of S. Mark, showing S. Giorgio, Salute, Doge’s palace, etc.’).3
The upper view is from the Canale di San Marco east of San Giorgio Maggiore, with the domes of Santa Maria della Salute across the Bacino beyond shipping, shaded contre-jour below the disk of the setting sun; the view continues north-west, where the focus is the campanile of St Mark’s.
Below is a similar laterally compressed prospect, apparently from a little further west on the water, with San Giorgio out of sight and the domes of the Zitelle and Redentore on the Giudecca to the south-west on the left, the Salute a third of the way across, the towers of San Stefano and San Moisè north of the Grand Canal another third over, and the campanile of St Mark’s near the gutter. There is a brief continuation to the right on folio 51 recto opposite (D14411).
For other drawings made in the vicinity and an overview of Turner’s coverage of Venice, see the sketchbook’s Introduction.

Matthew Imms
March 2017

1
Undated MS note by A.J. Finberg (died 1939) in interleaved copy of Finberg 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, I, opposite p.513.
2
Undated MS note by C.F. Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, I, p.513.
3
Undated MS note by Bell (before 1936) in copy of Finberg 1930, Prints and Drawings Study Room, British Museum, London, p.164, as transcribed by Ian Warrell (undated notes, Tate catalogue files).

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Studies of Venice from the Bacino and Canale di San Marco, with the Setting Sun 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2017, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, July 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-studies-of-venice-from-the-bacino-and-canale-di-san-marco-r1186523, accessed 20 April 2024.