Joseph Mallord William Turner

Noting the subject simply as ‘Venice’, in 1857 John Ruskin described the evocative setting: ‘Just after sunset. The position of the city is indicated by the touches of white in the vermilion cloud.’ He continued:

The ‘touches of white’ Ruskin noted are no longer readily apparent (compare the treatment of the distant city in Tate D32153; Turner Bequest CCCXVI 16), while the ‘purple wall’ seems rather to be simply one more band of strong colour among the rest, modifying the green sea where it meets the horizon below the orange of the sky. Given the lack of features except the posts marking a channel,2 his idea of a ‘reminiscence of a return from Torcello’, among the many islands in the Lagoon a few miles north-east of the city, is entirely conjectural since there are no confirmed Torcello views,3 albeit such a voyage would place the apparent sunset effect in a correspondingly westerly direction. In 1881 he fancifully called the subject ‘Farewell to Venice’,4 perhaps contrasting it with the ‘Approach’ shown in both D32153 and a related painting. Latterly, Leo Costello has taken the present work as evoking ‘a space of desolation and emptiness’, where the ‘city hovers as a ghostly presence on the horizon, which seems to be passing into nothingness with the setting sun’,5 in ‘a “recession from history”’ itself.6

Somehow, by the early twentieth century the work’s official title had become ‘Venice, from Fusina’,7 in which case the view would be to the east, with the glowing sky conventionally assumed to indicate dawn. Martin Butlin noted Ruskin’s original Torcello suggestion as in accord with the ‘sunset effect’,8 and Lindsay Stainton has concurred,9 calling it ‘an astonishing image’,10 and ‘one of those flaming Venetian sunsets which writers from Aretino [1492–1556] onwards had enthusiastically described but which, until Turner, no artist since the Renaissance had painted’.11 Turner’s inscription on the verso (D40157) appears to describe a sunset, which would seem to strengthen the case.12 While noting that there is ‘nothing there’ topographically, Ian Warrell has suggested nevertheless that such colours might have been observed in the eastern part of the sky around sunset.13