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

Finberg later redundantly annotated his 1909 Inventory entry (‘Bridge of Sighs and part of the Ducal Palace’): ‘do. [i.e. ditto: B. Sighs] & part of Ducal Palace’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy: ‘Rio de Palazzo looking south’.2 He made a similar note in a copy of Finberg’s 1930 book In Venice with Turner.3 The page’s title was amended by Ian Warrell to ‘Looking down the Rio del Palazzo to the Bridge of Sighs, with San Giorgio Maggiore beyond; and the Southern Façade of the Doge’s Palace’ in 2003, in connection with his concurrent Turner and Venice exhibition at Tate Britain,4 where it and folio 30 verso opposite (D31985) were exhibited.5 The page was used horizontally for two separate studies, both ways up.

With the gutter at the bottom, the right-hand half shows the Bridge of Sighs high up between the New Prisons (on the left) and Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace), looking down the Rio del Palazzo to the more conventional Ponte della Paglia and the dome of San Giorgio Maggiore across the Bacino to the south-south-east in the distance. Selected details of the complex, heavily articulated Renaissance stonework on the palace’s west side include two balconies and indications of the panels of diamond rustication above the waterline. The less elaborate stone-dressed brickwork at the back of the Ca’ dei Dogi on the left runs on to the start of the stone of the prisons just this side of the Bridge of Sighs.

There is another detailed view from south of the bridge on the opposite page, under which related views are noted. The two elevations are very similar, and although the oil of Venice, the Bridge of Sighs shown at the Royal Academy in 1840 (Tate N00527)6 depicts the structure from the other direction, the present drawing shows its stonework in the clearest detail and doubtless informed the painting.

Turner had first made a slight sketch of the present scene from a little further north in the 1819 Milan to Venice sketchbook (Tate D14388; Turner Bequest CLXXV 39a). As Warrell has observed, however,7 his vignette watercolour of about 1830 (private collection),8 engraved in 1832 as The Bridge of Sighs, Venice for Lord Byron’s Life and Works (Tate impression: T06650), was based on what must have been a detailed ‘sketch by T. Little, Esq.’, apparently an obscure amateur, as acknowledged in the print’s lettering.9 A night scene, again looking towards the Bacino (lit by a brilliant moon over San Giorgio), it shows the bridge from a dramatically close, oblique angle, framed by a fictitious corner of the palace with a wrought-iron balcony in the right foreground. The present drawing may have been made at least in part as a conscious corrective to that romantic but inaccurate composition.

The other way up on the left is a partial study of the Doge’s Palace from the Bacino, focusing on the western end of its south front. This serves to supplement the careful view of the waterfront and Piazzetta from a similar point on folio 30 recto (D31984), where the palace lay just out of sight beyond the right-hand edge. To the left here is the south-west corner of the basilica of San Marco (St Mark’s), seen beyond the Piazzetta to the north. Although at first glance the two seem parts of a continuous view, the church seems set as if somewhat higher and comprises a rather jumbled array of details, perhaps hastily noted while in motion – contrast the much more sustained study centred on this corner in the 1819 Milan to Venice sketchbook (Tate D14399; Turner Bequest CLXXV 45). On the present occasion, Turner’s eye was caught by a small Austrian cannon, like the one shown more prominently in an 1840 colour study of the Piazzetta by night (Tate D32220; Turner Bequest CCCXVIII 1).

The palace is also shown in typically selective detail (compare folios 5 verso and 8 verso; D31936, D31942), with slight indications of the integral sculpture at the ‘Fig-tree angle’ (as John Ruskin later called it),10 which Turner had also drawn in the earlier Milan to Venice book (Tate D14412; Turner Bequest CLXXV 51a). The open Gothic arches along the Molo and their narrower counterparts above are inaccurately proportioned and soon tail off, while the façade’s upper balcony, actually centred over the ninth of the ground-floor arches, is squeezed in at the right-hand edge, with its elaborate stone surround continued upwards on an exaggerated scale across the gutter onto D31985.

The drawings between folio 26 verso and here (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,11 see its Introduction.