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

The drawing is inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation. Finberg subsequently amended his 1909 Inventory entry (‘The Ducal Palace, the Zecca, and the Salute’): ‘with the Salute beyond’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy: ‘from the foot of the Ponte della Paglia’.2 Bell similarly annotated Finberg’s more detailed 1930 In Venice with Turner entry.3

Looking west-south-west from the Riva degli Schiavoni, Turner shows the south front of the Doge’s Palace on the right, with the steps of the Ponte della Paglia in the bottom right corner,4 looking along the Molo to the columns at the entrance to the Piazzetta. Across the mouth of the Grand Canal on the left are the domes of Santa Maria della Salute.

As was his frequent practice, Turner has recorded only as many of a series of repeated architectural elements as required to infer the rest, here showing the first few arches of the ground floor along the Molo. There are seventeen in all, the nearest five being blocked up at that time, as seen for example in Canaletto’s painting from the late 1730s, Venice: The Doge’s Palace and the Riva degli Schiavoni (National Gallery, London). Hence the ‘17’ and ’12 o’ inscribed at that point, with the ‘o’ presumably indicating those that were open. Likewise, only two of the windows of the first arcade are shown, with the tracery of the quatrefoil roundels between not even indicated. Turner recorded similar elements on the building’s Piazzetta façade in more detail on folio 46 verso (D14402). On the Molo front there are thirty-five of the quatrefoil openings including a half at each end, set between thirty-four open arches. Turner’s incorrect ‘37’ below the central balcony appears to have been amended on the spot, with the second digit overwriting a ‘5’ or ‘8’.

Like the drawing in the opposite direction along the Molo on folio 53 verso (D14416), this is relatively slight, causing Finberg to call them ‘hurried and perfunctory sketches ... as though Turner was not keenly interested in the famous buildings’.5

Compare Richard Parkes Bonington’s oil painting Venice: Ducal Palace with a Religious Procession, exhibited in 1828 (Tate N05789), which shows the same prospect from a little further off. In the ‘1818–1821’ volume of Finberg’s personal, chronologically arranged albums of Turner’s works he compared the view to that in The Ducal Palace, Venice, an 1835 drawing by John Ruskin.6

For Turner’s other drawings made in the vicinity and an overview of his coverage of Venice, see the sketchbook’s Introduction.