Joseph Mallord William Turner

The subject of this evocative but at first sight somewhat generic evocation of the distant skyline of Venice has been a cause of speculation as to its topography (and consequently which end of the day might be represented) until its subject and thus its orientation were firmly established relatively recently.1 Finberg annotated his laconic 1909 Inventory title ‘Venice’ with ‘Lagoon’.2 In another copy he noted: ‘Salute in distance’.3 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated another copy: ‘from the Giudecca looking east, sunrise’.4 Bell similarly annotated Finberg’s In Venice with Turner (1930): ‘From the Giudecca, looking East, sunrise? I cannot feel at all sure abt the locality of this subject’.5 Finberg later mused:

In the most sustained speculative account, Lindsay Stainton called the view ‘puzzling’, declaring that there is ‘no point either within the area of Venice itself (such as the entrance to the Canale della Giudecca) or out on the Lagoon from which such a view can be seen’, suggesting that the spire on the left might be intended to evoke the campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s), with the Riva degli Schiavoni waterfront stretching east towards the Giardini Pubblici, albeit with many elisions or omissions, concluding that the this might be ‘an “ideal” view of the famous waterfront reconstructed from memory’ despite its apparent immediacy.7

Ian Warrell has since convincingly linked the skyline of the left-hand half of the view to a double-page pencil drawing in the smaller contemporary Venice to Ancona sketchbook (Tate D14526–D14527; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 20a–21),8 the first being inscribed with notes of colours and tones including ‘all the steeples blood red’. Warrell has observed ‘how Turner played with the positioning of bell towers and domes to produce a greater sense of recession’, while ‘the presence of rosy clouds perhaps indicates a moment just before sunrise’, which ‘could be a directly observed phenomenon’, albeit bearing in mind the annotations to the pencil sketch.9 He has suggested the ‘real or imagined vantage point’ as the Palazzo (or Ca’) Giustinian, on the north side of the entrance to the Grand Canal,10 apparently the viewpoint for the early morning views originally on adjacent pages of this sketchbook (D15254, D15256; Turner Bequest CLXXXI 4, 6), although the pencil sketch may have been made from a little way out on the waters around the Dogana. It is perhaps significant that there are moored boats and a passing gondola at the equivalent point in the pencil sketch to the slight but assured indications of boats and a landing stage in the foreground here.