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

Finberg later annotated his 1909 Inventory entry (‘The Bridge of Sighs. (Oil painting of “Bridge of Sighs” in RA 1840 – Now N.G.527’): ‘B. Sighs – not same view as RA. 1840’1 and again ‘not same view’.2 The page’s title was amended by Ian Warrell to ‘The Bridge of Sighs, Looking up the Rio del Palazzo’ in 2003, in connection with his concurrent Turner and Venice exhibition at Tate Britain,3 where it and folio 31 recto opposite (D31986) were exhibited.4 The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally.

The key feature of the scene, the elevated Bridge of Sighs, is rather crammed in at the top centre, with no room for the stone volutes which crown its profile; the corresponding elements on its far side are shown from the other direction on the opposite page. In the present view, the prospect is northwards up the canyon-like Rio del Palazzo, flanked by the heavily articulated stonework of the Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace) on the left and the New Prisons opposite, with the Ponte della Canonica and Palazzo Trevisan in the distance.

The relatively plain banding along the rusticated prison walls appears distorted in being depicted from a slightly less oblique angle, perhaps in order to record details more clearly, inadvertently making it seem as if the canal widens out towards the foreground. A few crisp points of the palace’s elaborate grid of diamond rustication (with alternating convex and concave stones) are indicated on the left on the near side of the entrance arches below the bridge, of which there are two rather than three at this point, with another sequence of four further on. Unusually, if understandably, there is light diagonal hatching to suggest a generalised effect of shade.

The left foreground appears somewhat provisional, with an isolated arch perhaps serving as a reminder of the arcade along the palace’s south front, and arcing lines which may be an impression of the Ponte della Paglia’s underside as Turner’s boat passed from the Bacino (see folio 29 recto; D31982). The inverted inscription to the left, perhaps ‘P^e Despurse’, seems to be in relation to the view of the bridge the other way up on the opposite page, in an attempt at ‘Ponte dei Sospiri’, as Warrell has observed.5

Like Finberg,6 Warrell has linked this drawing, along with folios 5 verso, 24 verso and 29 recto (D31936, D31973, D31982), to the oil painting of Venice, the Bridge of Sighs, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840 (Tate N00527),7 which shows the view directly down the side canal notionally from some way out on the Bacino, flanked more conventionally by the quayside fronts of the buildings it connects;8 see also folio 9 recto (D31943). For another sequence of definite and likely sketches up and down the canal around the bridge between folios 61 verso and 66 recto (D32046–D32055). Compare in particular folio 62 verso (D32048), where Turner aimed to present a similar view in relation to the north side of the Ponte della Paglia. Perhaps his most emotive response to the confines of the setting is a colour study of 1840, showing the Bridge of Sighs silhouetted against a starry sky (Tate D32253; Turner Bequest CCCXIX 5).

At the bottom right is a continuation upwards from the study of the Bacino façade of the Doge’s Palace on the opposite page; this part is limited to the elaborate stonework including niches and pinnacles, the setting for a female figure of Justice, extending above the roofline over the central balcony. Folios 26 verso to 31 recto (D31977–D31986) may record a continuous short trip from the south-eastern end of the Grand Canal eastwards to the Bridge of Sighs. For this sketchbook’s convoluted general sequence, including Hardy George’s broad overview,9 see its Introduction.