Joseph Mallord William Turner

This airy interior is apparently Turner’s own bedroom high up at the north-eastern corner of the Hotel Europa (the Palazzo Giustinian),1 where he stayed in 1840, as he had in 1833 (see the Introduction to this subsection, and further comment at the end of this entry). This is corroborated by his emphatic note on the verso (‘J M W T Bedroom at Venice’);2 compare inscriptions mentioning ‘my Bed Room’ on the versos of Tate D32140 and D32179 (CCCXVI 3, 42). The bright vertical slivers of the vista through the windows show the campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s) in afternoon sunlight to the north-east on the left and that of San Giorgio Maggiore less conspicuously to the south-east at the centre.3

Although in relative shadow, the interior is flooded with ambient light and enlivened by areas of earthy red with hints of furniture, deeper sky-like blue areas flanking the windows, a decorated ceiling and what Finberg described as ‘bright yellow mosquito nets over the beds’.4 He reasonably suggested that it was ‘painted direct from sight’,5 something which can rarely be said for certain of Turner’s watercolour landscape studies. Ian Warrell has described the room as ‘a temporary studio’ for the sequence of rooftop views over central Venice grouped here,6 and it was likely used for working on at least some of the extensive range of watercolours showing other aspects of the city.

Jack Lindsay included this work among examples of Turner’s depictions both of bedrooms and of sexual imagery,7 and David Blayney Brown has described the ‘vividness and immediacy’ and ‘joyousness’ of the setting with its ‘tumbled untidiness of bedding and clothing’,8 which James Hamilton has read as a ‘potent subject’ for the artist, with ‘crumpled sheets on his bed, and ample evidence, if any were needed, that a woman helped him keep his bed warm’.9 Compare the explicit representation of a bedroom and its abandoned inhabitants in the 1802 Swiss Figures sketchbook from Turner’s first Continental tour in 1802 (Tate D04798; Turner Bequest LXXVIII 1).