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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, with the Dogana, Campanile and Basilica of San Marco (St Mark's), and Palazzo Ducale (Doge's Palace) from the Bacino 1819

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 63 Verso:
Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, with the Dogana, Campanile and Basilica of San Marco (St Mark’s), and Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace) from the Bacino 1819
D14436
Turner Bequest CLXXV 63a
Pencil on white wove paper, 112 x 185 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, the drawing continues across folio 64 recto opposite (D14437). The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘S. Maria della Salute and Dogana on left, with Campanile and Piazzetta on the right’): ‘and Doge’s Palace from San Giorgio’.1
On this page the view is north across the Bacino to the Piazzetta, flanked by the campanile and domes of St Mark’s. The Doge’s Palace is lightly indicated on the right, but detail fades out to the left below the campanile of San Moisè, the last significant landmark in this half. There is a separate detail of a domed tower at the top right. The opposite page takes in the Salute and Dogana, looking north-west across the end of the Giudecca Canal, the viewpoint being on or close to the eastern tip of the Giudecca where it almost meets the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore. A comparable, more consistently detailed view from the Bacino is on folios 56 verso, 57 verso and 58 verso (D14422, D14424, D14426).
Ian Warrell has noted that the present page ‘does not have sufficient detail for it to have been the source’2 for the 1819 watercolour of a similar view in the Como and Venice sketchbook, which may have been made directly,3 and shows the buildings aligned as if seen from slightly further east.
For other drawings made in the vicinity and an overview of Turner’s coverage of Venice, see the sketchbook’s Introduction.

Matthew Imms
March 2017

1
Undated MS note by C.F. Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, I, p.514.
2
Warrell 2003, p.263 note 8.
3
See ibid., p.88.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, with the Dogana, Campanile and Basilica of San Marco (St Mark’s), and Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace) from the Bacino 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2017, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, July 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-santa-maria-della-salute-venice-with-the-dogana-campanile-r1186548, accessed 19 September 2024.