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

Turner’s viewpoint was about level with the Calle Traghetto Vecchio on the south side of the Grand Canal, looking north-east to the Rialto Bridge, shown towards the left in the full-page part of the panorama on folio 73 recto (D14455) of which this is an extension. In the middle of the section extending two thirds of the way across the current page is the Palazzo Papadopoli, with its twin obelisk finials, half obscured by a sail on the north side of the canal, with the lower Palazzo Giustiniani Businello beyond. There is now a garden where small buildings are shown on the near side of the Papadopoli, while the view fades out at the left with one bay of the Palazzo Donà della Trezza.1 At the top left are slight, annotated thumbnail sketches of Gothic and classical details of façades; not immediately identifiable, they were presumably made in the vicinity.

When this leaf was rebound and stamped after being displayed in the nineteenth century, Finberg’s 1909 Inventory sequence, clear from his descriptive title for the recto and uninformative note ‘Drawing on reverse’ for the verso, was disrupted. The present page was, by the implication of its ‘a’ suffix in his Inventory, the verso in his estimation, but it has since been bound as the recto and stamped as ‘74’. What is now the verso (D14457) was evidently, by its subject and more light-affected condition, the exhibited side. For a discussion of the twelve leaves removed and restored in this way, see the technical notes in the sketchbook’s Introduction.

Finberg subsequently made a separate note against his 1909 Inventory entry, bracketing ‘reverse [sic] of 73’ with the present page, now numbering it ‘74’ and describing it as ‘P. Tiepolo (now Papadopoli) with P. Businello. Part of V. from T^o S. Benedetto. cf. Farnley Hall w. c^r’.2 The drawing should be continuous with D14455 (noted at the start of this entry), but the latter is now misbound as folio 73 recto, rather than inverted on the verso to match up with the present part of the view. Finberg reproduced them as a composite image in his 1930 book In Venice with Turner, where he listed them as ‘p. 73, 74’;3 in the plate they are untitled as such, but reproduced above the composition derived from them, captioned: ‘The Rialto, 1820. Water-colour in the collection of Major F.H. Fawkes. With the pencil sketch from nature’.4

This page was a source both for the watercolour The Rialto, Venice (Indianapolis Museum of Art)5 which Turner made in 1820 or 1821 for his friend and major patron Walter Fawkes of Farnley Hall in Yorkshire,6 and to a lesser extent the vertical-format oil painting The Grand Canal, Venice, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1837 (Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California).7 Both are discussed in detail under D14455, the main body of the prospect, where similar views are also noted. Finberg observed that the pencil study was ‘more accurate’ that the Fawkes watercolour; he described in particular a ‘curious blunder in the upper part of the façade of the Coccina Tiepolo palace (now the Papadopoli) on the left’:

Turner may have been distracted in developing this part of the watercolour by the need to fit the architecture around the arcing shapes of the large sails which had impeded his view of this part of the waterfront while making his sketch; they are faithfully retained in the finished composition. His view of buildings near the Rialto on the verso (D14457) was similarly impeded.

For other drawings made in the vicinity and an overview of Turner’s coverage of Venice, see the sketchbook’s Introduction.

Technical notes:

Finberg subsequently annotated his 1909 Inventory entry for this page as ‘do’, i.e. ditto, referring to a preceding note, ‘stained by flood | 13/8/29’,1 following inspection after the Tate Gallery flood of January 1928.