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

The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘On the Grand Canal – “St. Leando (?).”’): ‘on the out-skirts’.1 The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally. The view is indeed on the periphery of the city, and in identifying its precise subject, Ian Warrell has compared it to a Canaletto painting of about 1772–3 in the Royal Collection, showing The Canale di Santa Chiara looking North towards the Lagoon,2 indicating the old name of this final north-western section of the Grand Canal.

The viewpoint was along the southern end of the Fondamenta Santa Chiara, near the later bridge over the twentieth-century Rio Nuovo. After considerable changes, perhaps the best vantage point today is the modern Ponte della Costituzione, crossing the last sharp turn of the canal to the Fondamenta Santa Lucia south of the railway station. The bridge now effectively frames this view from the quay, and the prospect north-north-west to the open Lagoon and the mainland is impeded by railway and road bridges across this last reach, which is narrower than in Turner’s time following reclamation on the opposite bank for marshalling yards. All of this prevents a clear view of the only labelled feature, the small Isola di San Secondo, which lies on the far side of the parallel road and rail bridges to the mainland. Its church had been supressed and demolished after 1806 and the site used for military purposes, and it is now abandoned and overgrown.3

A continuous run of older palaces survives in the foreground, although Turner’s selective details of characteristic windows and balconies are difficult to match with particular features. Those at the centre have been replaced by a more regular frontage, and the floating Piazzale Roma ferry stations project into the canal. Beyond, across what is now the entry to the extended Canale di Santa Chiara, is the former island convent of that name; then a military hospital, it now houses the local police and the Red Cross.4 The small campanile at its south-east corner, shown in Canaletto’s painting and in Turner’s smaller drawing of the scene in the 1819 Milan to Venice sketchbook (Tate D14475; Turner Bequest CLXXV 83a), is no longer evident in this 1833 sketch.

Folio 79 recto opposite (D32075) shows the view from this point north-eastwards towards various churches, as also shown in another small drawing on the same page of the Milan to Venice book. See under folio 74 verso (D32066), for the long series of Grand Canal views in this part of the present book; for its somewhat convoluted general sequence, see the Introduction. Turner explored this end of the city by water in 1840, before the development of the extensive western docks, and made a note of Santa Chiara among other churches then overlooking the Lagoon in the Venice and Botzen sketchbook (Tate D31851; Turner Bequest CCCXIII 31a).