Joseph Mallord William Turner

Albeit differing in detail, the general arrangement of the boats in the foreground and the distant skyline of Venice across the Lagoon, as well as the colour and mood in this watercolour clearly relate to the oil painting Approach to Venice, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; engraved in 1859: Tate impression T05193).1 In recognising the connection, in 1857 John Ruskin gave the present work the same title, and described it briefly: ‘From the land side, before the railroad bridge was built. The line of green posts marks the edge of the deep water channel which led from Mestre to the opening of the Grand Canal. Very noble.’2

By the turn of the twentieth century its title had been extended to ‘The Approach to Venice: Sunset.’3 Ian Warrell has observed that the posts are not present in the painting, ‘in accordance, no doubt, with [the poet Samuel] Rogers’s phrase, “The path lies o’er the sea | Invisible”’, quoted in the 1844 Academy catalogue.4 There a full moon is shown low on the left (at the point where the twin sails bisect the horizon here), and the scene indeed appears to be set around sunset, and thus viewed from the north. Eric Shanes has noted the sails among examples of this motif which occurs most prominently in Campo Santo, Venice, exhibited in 1842 (Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio),5 where in combination with their reflections they perhaps evoke an angel’s wings in relation to the cemetery subject,6 and Lindsay Stainton has considered this watercolour as ‘imbued with something of the same elegiac qualities’.7 As well as the more straightforward connection to the 1844 painting, Warrell has proposed a link with Morning, Returning from the Ball, St Martino, exhibited at the Academy in 1845 (private collection),8 where ‘the elegant boat with paired sails on the left is redeployed to play an important role in anchoring the design’.9

As Warrell has approvingly noted,10 Finberg characterised the composition’s ‘lyrical fervour’, with the city ‘banished to the distance; it is nothing but a few domes and towers gleaming uncertainly’, picked out in fluid white gouache ‘above the water in the mists of evening. The whole interest is thrown upon the sky and water’, with the boats and figures ‘merely accessories’; as such he felt it ‘sets a standard of imaginative intensity’ not sustained in most of the Venice colour studies.11 Stainton and Warrell have proposed its theme as an echo of the more conventional watercolour Venice, from Fusina (private collection),12 painted a year or two after Turner’s first visit in 1819, with its distant, generalised evocation of the pale city on the horizon across the Lagoon as a backdrop to detailed boats and figures on the shores of the mainland.13