Joseph Mallord William Turner

Study for ‘Venice (The Rialto - Moonlight)’, Rogers’s ‘Poems’

c.1830–2

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

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Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
Watercolours Related to Samuel Rogers’s Poems
Medium
Graphite and watercolour on paper
Dimensions
Support: 168 × 239 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D27625
Turner Bequest CCLXXX 108

Catalogue entry

This is a preparatory study for the finished watercolour vignette, Venice (The Rialto – Moonlight), which was published in the 1834 edition of Rogers’s Poems, as an illustration to a poem entitled ‘Human Life’ (see Tate D27713; Turner Bequest 196). All of the major features of the composition are present in this initial sketch including the Rialto Bridge, the surrounding architecture, the gondolas and their gondoliers.
The style and medium of this sketch are typical of Turner’s preparatory studies for Rogers’s Poems, which tend to be executed in pencil and light watercolour wash. It was formerly part of a parcel of studies described by John Ruskin as ‘A.B. 83. P.R. Studies for Italy. Coarse, but noble’.1 Finberg records how Ruskin later described his phrasing in a letter to Ralph Nicholson Wornum as ‘horrible’, adding ‘I never meant it to be permanent’.2
1
Finberg 1909, vol.II, p.896.
2
Ibid., vol.I, p.xi.
Verso:
Inscribed by unknown hands in pencil ‘CCLXXX 108’ lower right and ‘AB 83 P | R’ lower right

Meredith Gamer
August 2006

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