Joseph Mallord William Turner

The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s terse 1909 Inventory entry (‘The Lovers’): ‘Jessica at the window?’.1 He was presumably thinking of Turner’s painting Jessica, exhibited in 1830 (Tate T03887, displayed at Petworth House),2 which shows the single central figure facing the viewer through an open window which fills almost the whole picture; it was accompanied in the Royal Academy catalogue on that occasion by the text ‘Shylock – “Jessica, shut the window, I say” – The Merchant of Venice.’ This was a spurious quotation from Shakespeare’s play, albeit likely conflated from similar lines.3

In 1836 Turner had shown another painting, Juliet and her Nurse (private collection; engraved in 1842 as ‘St Mark’s Place, Venice’: Tate impression T05188),4 with the characters from Shakespeare’s Verona tragedy Romeo and Juliet incongruously overlooking the Piazza San Marco.5 Uncertainty as to the dates of Turner’s visit(s) to Venice between 1819 and 1840 (agreed comparatively recently as limited to one intermediate occasion, in 1833) has often led to various gouache works on grey and brown paper now associated with 1840, including nocturnal scenes with fireworks around the Bacino, being considered as studies for the painting.6 The 1837 oil of The Grand Canal, Venice (Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California)7 features a minor episode from The Merchant of Venice, and other subjects in the present subsection have resonances with Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice.8

Potentially, therefore, a Shakespearean connection might be feasible here. While noting a possible Merchant link, Andrew Wilton characterised the scene less romantically than Finberg, classifying it prosaically as ‘Two Women at a Window, below which stand Two Men’.9 Lindsay Stainton tentatively called it ‘The lovers: a scene from “The Merchant of Venice” (?)’, noting that Turner ‘was quite capable of imagining it being staged in the streets of Venice’, with a ‘resulting element of fantasy’.10 Anne Lyles subtitled it ‘? a Scene from “Romeo and Juliet”’, suggesting the well-known balcony scene in the play,11 ‘when Romeo, having spotted Juliet at a window, approaches to speak to her from below (in this study the figure lower left appears to be playing a musical instrument)’ with the ‘apparently older woman ... explained as her nurse, now wearing night dress.’12 Jan Piggott has suggested an alternative where the ‘woman with a maid at a window and a lover with musician below, ... may represent Jessica and Lorenzo’,13 although in the relevant scene from the Merchant where Jessica speaks to her future husband Lorenzo through a window prior to eloping, she is disguised as a boy.14