Joseph Mallord William Turner

Figures in a Venetian Gondola

1819

Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

License this image

Not on display

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of: Milan to Venice Sketchbook
Medium: Graphite on paper
Dimensions: Support: 112 × 185 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference: D14331
Turner Bequest CLXXV 3 b

Catalogue entry

This rapid sketch of figures in a gondola was drawn close to the gutter with the page turned vertically. Listed in Finberg’s 1909 Inventory, albeit numbered as if it belonged much earlier in this book book’s foliated sequence,1 this minor study is not mentioned among the book’s contents in Finberg’s 1930 volume on Venice,2 and perhaps remained yet to be bound in.

For other studies of boats in this sketchbook, see under folio 37 recto (D14383).

See Finberg 1909, I, p.512.

See A.J. Finberg, In Venice with Turner, London 1930, p.166.

Technical notes:

The surviving fragment of the original leaf on which this drawing was made represents perhaps a fifth of its original area. The rest has been made up with similar later paper, probably as part of the general conservation and restoration programme after Turner Bequest works were moved to the British Museum following the 1928 Tate Gallery flood.

Verso:

Blank

Matthew Imms
March 2017

Read full Catalogue entry