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

The view is westwards from the Bacino off the porch of the Dogana, from close enough to align it so as to form a trio with the much larger Baroque domes of the church of Santa Maria della Salute, shown as a paler mass to its left, silhouetted against the brilliant white spot of the setting sun over the Grand Canal. Compare a pencil drawing from a little further off in the 1819 Milan to Venice sketchbook (Tate D14438; Turner Bequest CLXXV 64a), and an 1840 colour study on a separate sheet (Tate D32163; Turner Bequest CCCXVI 26), with the porch and domes side-lined on the right to frame a shadowy evening view of the Canale della Giudecca.

Andrew Wilton noted this as ‘very similar in viewpoint, colouring and treatment’ to another study from this sketchbook (D32130; CCCXV 14),1 which shows a view from further off in similar hazy conditions. See also three contemporary studies on pale grey-white paper, looking across the Bacino in evening light with the Dogana and Salute on the left (Tate D32150–D32152; Turner Bequest CCCXVI 13–15).2 Wilton has described the effect here, ‘of the greatest simplicity and directness, relying only on exquisitely suggestive washes of a few colours’.3

Timothy Wilcox has characterised the ‘still, suffused light of Venice, intimated fleetingly in a few sheets in 1819, is here triumphantly recaptured’, but whereas ‘the buildings ... provided a pivot to earlier compositions, a small area of solid set against the unbounded expanse of sea and sky’ here they are ‘no longer presented as elements of contrast; they are one and the same medium as their surroundings, impregnated with the watery light which draws the entire scene into a single unity.’4 Of the handful of 1819 colour studies in the Como and Venice sketchbook, compare and contrast the atmospheric yet crisply detailed view from near the Dogana towards San Giorgio Maggiore across the Bacino, silhouetted on the right against the glare of the low morning sun (Tate D15254; Turner Bequest CLXXXI 4), essentially a fortuitous mirror image of the present composition.

Ian Warrell has noted5 how Turner’s contemporary, the marine painter Clarkson Stanfield (1793–1867), ‘intuitively recognised the visual similarities between the tip of the Dogana and the prow of a ship,6 and this was a motif that Turner also chose to isolate in his paintings’ such as in this study, ‘metamorphosed into the prow of an otherworldly boat, bearing down on the viewer’,7 and D32130, and the subsequent oils Dogana, and Madonna della Salute, Venice, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)8 and Venice – Maria della Salute, shown there in 1844 (Tate N00539).9

Warrell has outlined the way this work and D32130 ‘treat the pyramidal bulk of the Dogana and the Salute as a combined motif ... suffused with a zesty lemon sunlight’, evoking ‘the eye’s inability to pick out detail when looking at objects against the light’, here representing ‘the light through which we see the objects, sacrificing clarity for effect. The muted purple shadows here are complementary to the yellow, but at the same time they seem to anticipate the approach to local colours adopted by [Claude] Monet and his [Impressionist] associates many years afterwards.’10 Warrell has compared this study with the more developed 1840 watercolour The Doge’s Palace and the Piazzetta (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin),11 where ‘our ability to see the buildings is inhibited by the brightness of the setting sun, so that we see light, not substance.’12

Michael O’Neill of Durham University used this work as an example in an extensive discussion of Turner’s work in relation to the imagery of European landscape, colour and light in the poetry of his short-lived Romantic contemporary Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).13

Technical notes:

The sun itself was reserved or lifted out, leaving a very bright, small spot with fuzzy edges within the yellow sky.

Verso:

Blank; inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘Book No 13’ bottom left; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram over ‘CCCXV – 17’ towards bottom left.