J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally. Here, Turner’s viewpoint was near the Palazzo (or Ca’) Corner della Ca’ Granda (seen from the east on the recto; D32067), on the north side of the Grand Canal, with loose indications of steps or landing stages and small boats. What may be the corner of the nearby Palazzo Barbarigo runs down the left-hand edge; the next palaces are likely the Marin Contarini and the Grimani, with its pedimented penthouse and balconies. The floating Santa Maria del Giglio ferry station now extends into the canal at that point.

As recognised by Finberg,1 the view is eastwards to the canal’s Bacino entrance, with loose indications of the masts of moored boats beyond. Coming forwards on the south side, the porch of the Dogana is seen in the centre, with a slender pointed form to its right likely intended as the campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore to the east-south-east across the Bacino. The next block to the right is the Seminario Patriarcale, at the near end of the Dogana, with the domes of Santa Maria soaring above. Much of the church is now obscured from this angle by the neo-Gothic Palazzo Genovese, which supplanted the jumble of smaller buildings, and the significance of the rounded form on the roofline towards the right is uncertain.

There is a more detailed variation of this view immediately ‘above’ on folio 76 recto opposite (D32069); Turner seems to have been working from the ‘back’ of the book (as now foliated) at this point, while approaching from the west (see folio 76 verso; D32070), but it is unclear which of the two would have been drawn first. See under folio 74 verso (D32066), for the long series of Grand Canal views in this part of the sketchbook; for its somewhat convoluted general sequence, including Hardy George’s broad overview,2 see the Introduction.

In 1968, when the currently accepted dates of Turner’s visits to Venice and the distribution of the works associated with them had yet to be formalised, Luke Herrmann mentioned this page3 in relation to an atmospheric watercolour of the scene, The Grand Canal, with the Salute (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford),4 a leaf from the so-called ‘Storm’ sketchbook now associated with the 1840 tour (as discussed in its Introduction). Any similarity is doubtless fortuitous, as Turner depicted the well-known elements here in varying juxtapositions from slightly different viewpoints on numerous occasions, as discussed under folio 26 verso (D31977), which was drawn from slightly further back.