Joseph Mallord William Turner

Anticipating later appreciation of this watercolour’s formal qualities over its perplexing topography, John Ruskin wrote in 1857, calling it simply ‘Venetian Fishing-Boat’: ‘I am not certain of the locality of this sketch; but it is a very interesting one in the distinctness and simplicity of its forms. The reason of the great prominence given to the sail of the boat is, that its curved and sharp characters may give the utmost possible amount of opposition to the absolutely rectangular outline of the buildings. The sky is very beautiful.’1

Early in the following century, when it had come to be catalogued on unspecified grounds as ‘Venice: Suburb towards Murano’,2 the Lagoon island north-east of the city, the editor and critic Charles Lewis Hind, who wrote on the Post-Impressionists, suggested that it showed ‘“the way [Turner] worked,” when painting for his own pleasure, not for exhibition – green water, violet hills, rosy buildings held together by the strength of that tawny sail – lovely.’3 His contemporary J.E. Phythian included this work among other Venetian studies he called ‘brilliant in light and colour’ and ‘impressionistic’ in the broadest sense, simply praising its ‘lovely morning light’.4

In 1974 the sheet was exhibited as ‘Venice: the Riva degli Schiavoni, with a Fishing Boat’, and Andrew Wilton suggested links to pencil drawings in the contemporary Rotterdam to Venice sketchbook (Tate D32431–D32432; Turner Bequest CCCXX 86, 86a);5 the port view of a boat sailing past San Giorgio Maggiore in the first is loosely comparable, while any resemblance between the waterfront in the second, seen east of the Bacino, and the present skyline is likely fortuitous. Wilton later considered this work in relation to other colour studies: ‘its combination of salmon-pink and green occurs in various examples from the disbound books’ (or separate contemporary sheets). Lindsay Stainton noted that ‘the aquamarine, clear blue and orange-pink colours of this study’ are also seen in those designated within Turner Bequest section CCCXVI,6 arranged according to subject in parallel subsections of the present catalogue.