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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1830-35 Annual tourist > Southern Germany, Austria and Venice ... > Venice Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Cannaregio Canal, Venice, with the Ponte dei Tre Archi and the Campanile of San Giobbe 1833

Image 1 of 2
  • Enhanced image
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Cannaregio Canal, Venice, with the Ponte dei Tre Archi and the Campanile of San Giobbe’ 1833
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 48 Verso:
The Cannaregio Canal, Venice, with the Ponte dei Tre Archi and the Campanile of San Giobbe 1833
D32020
Turner Bequest CCCXIV 48a
Pencil on white laid paper, 109 x 203 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Finberg later annotated his 1909 Inventory entry (‘Buildings and bridges’): ‘Cannaregio, 3 arch bridge’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy: ‘The Canareggio [sic], Ponte tre archi’.2 He made a similar note in a copy of Finberg’s 1930 book In Venice with Turner.3 The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally.
This is one of very few drawings made in the relatively remote Cannaregio district of the city on the present visit. Something had drawn him here in 1819, when he made a more detailed view from the far side of the bridge, near the Lagoon end of the Cannaregio Canal, in the Milan to Venice sketchbook (Tate D14479; Turner Bequest CLXXV 86). See also the 1840 Venice; Passau to Würzburg book (D31294; CCCX 9a).
The view on the present occasion is from the Fondamenta Cannaregio, looking west-north-west to the Ponte dei Tre Archi on the right, with the long Renaissance frontage of the most imposing building in the vicinity, the Palazzo Surian, squeezed obliquely in the foreground. Oddly, Turner does not show the bridge’s smaller outer arches, leaving the spaces beyond the narrow brick niches flanking the central one blank. On the left foreground is the single span of the Ponte della Crea bridge at the entrance to the rio of the same name, off the opposite side of the main canal, although the loose handling does not make its spatial relationship with the other bridge, a considerable way off, self-evident. The buildings between them have apparently changed somewhat, but the campanile of San Giobbe still rises south of the Ponte dei Tre Archi and west of the other bridge.
The other Cannaregio subjects recorded in this sketchbook are around the southern end of the canal near at junction with the Grand Canal; see folios 49 recto opposite, 57 verso and 81 recto (D32021, D32038, D32079). For the book’s somewhat convoluted general sequence, see its Introduction.

Matthew Imms
May 2019

1
Undated MS note by Finberg (died 1939) in interleaved copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, opposite p.1014.
2
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.1014.
3
Undated MS note by Bell in copy of A.J. Finberg, In Venice with Turner, London 1930, Study Room, British Museum, London, opposite p.169, as transcribed by Ian Warrell (Tate cataloguing files, as ‘before 1936’).

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Cannaregio Canal, Venice, with the Ponte dei Tre Archi and the Campanile of San Giobbe 1833 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2019, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, March 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-cannaregio-canal-venice-with-the-ponte-dei-tre-archi-and-r1203698, accessed 15 May 2025.