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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Venice, Austria and Southern Germany ... > Venice and Botzen Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Churches of San Simeone Piccolo and the Scalzi on the Grand Canal, Venice, with the Cupolas of Santa Lucia 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Churches of San Simeone Piccolo and the Scalzi on the Grand Canal, Venice, with the Cupolas of Santa Lucia’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 34 Recto:
The Churches of San Simeone Piccolo and the Scalzi on the Grand Canal, Venice, with the Cupolas of Santa Lucia 1840
D31856
Turner Bequest CCCXIII 34
Pencil on cream wove paper, 123 x 173 mm
Partial watermark ‘J. Wha’
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘34’ top right, ascending vertically
Stamped in black ‘CCCXIII – 34’ top right, ascending vertically
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Finberg later annotated his generic 1909 Inventory entry (‘Buildings on canal’): ‘S. Sim. Picco’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell similarly marked another copy: ‘San Simeone Piccolo’.2 There are two similar views here, made with the page turned horizontally both ways.
At the outer edge, the prospect is to the south-west along the Grand Canal, with the dome and portico of San Simeone Piccolo on the left and the front of the Scalzi church slightly nearer on right, in front of the twin cupolas of the lost church of Santa Lucia, which was demolished a few years after Turner’s visit to make way for the railway station.3 The Ponte degli Scalzi now spans the canal in the foreground.
Below, the other way up, is a similar view from a little further south-west, off the schematically rendered Baroque front of the Scalzi. San Simeone is shown from about this point in an atmospheric contemporary watercolour (Tate D32124; Turner Bequest CCCXV 8).
There is a view the other direction on folio 33 verso opposite (D31855).

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
Undated MS note by Finberg (died 1939) in interleaved copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.1010.
2
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.1010.
3
See Jeff Cotton, ‘Santa Lucia’, The Churches of Venice, accessed 21 June 2018, http://www.churchesofvenice.co.uk/demolished.htm#santalucia.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Churches of San Simeone Piccolo and the Scalzi on the Grand Canal, Venice, with the Cupolas of Santa Lucia 1840 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, September 2018, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-churches-of-san-simeone-piccolo-and-the-scalzi-on-the-r1196751, accessed 24 April 2024.