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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
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Joseph Mallord William Turner The North-West End of the Grand Canal, Venice, with the Churches of Santa Lucia, the Scalzi and San Simeone Piccolo, and San Geremia in the Distance 1833

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The North-West End of the Grand Canal, Venice, with the Churches of Santa Lucia, the Scalzi and San Simeone Piccolo, and San Geremia in the Distance’ 1833
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 79 Verso:
The North-West End of the Grand Canal, Venice, with the Churches of Santa Lucia, the Scalzi and San Simeone Piccolo, and San Geremia in the Distance 1833
D32076
Turner Bequest CCCXIV 79a
Pencil on white laid paper, 109 x 203 mm
Partial watermark: crescent moon with face in profile
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘w’ towards top right, beside dome
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Finberg later annotated his basic 1909 Inventory entry (‘On the Grand Canal (?)’: ‘S Simeone Piccolo on right’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy2 and a copy of Finberg’s 1930 book In Venice with Turner to the same effect.3 The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally.
The view is to the east-north-east from near the north-western entrance to the canal; there is a similar prospect from further back on the recto (D32075). The north side was transformed by the construction of the railway station and the Fondamenta Santa Lucia, commemorating the church of that name, with its twin campanili, seen towards the left here.4 By comparison with the labelled engraving by Dionisio Moretti in Antonio Quadri’s 1828 survey of Il Canal Grande di Venezia (plate 21), Ian Warrell has identified the building in the immediate foreground as the lost Scuola dei Nobili.5
Past Santa Lucia, the view remains much the same, with the oblique pedimented front of the nearby Scalzi church; the Ponte degli Scalzi now crosses just beyond it. In the distance, on the same side of the canal, are the campanile and dome of San Geremia (see folio 81 recto; D32079), at the northernmost point of the long, slow bend to the right. Returning along the south side, the neo-classical portico and outsize dome of San Simeone Piccolo rise between the palaces. The tall canal-side block on the near side is recognisable, but a long, regular hotel façade has replaced the varied buildings to the right, obscuring the church’s smaller southern dome and campanile from this angle; Turner does not show the small dome which now crowns its belfry. The ‘w’ (for white) beside them seems to be linked by a diagonal stroke to the stucco of the main dome’s drum.
A half-page study of the church and its setting on folio 85 verso (D32087) gives a better sense of the projection of its monumental porch, and folio 81 verso (D32080) shows the whole scene from a little further forward. See under folio 74 verso (D32066), for the long series of Grand Canal views in this part of the sketchbook; for its somewhat convoluted general sequence, see the Introduction.
There are comparable pencil studies in the 1819 Milan to Venice sketchbook (Tate D14478; Turner Bequest CLXXV 85) and the 1840 Venice and Botzen book (D31855; CCCXIII 35a). San Simeone features in an atmospheric twilit watercolour from the other direction in the Grand Canal and Giudecca sketchbook from the latter visit (D32124; CCCXV 8).6

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, p.1015.
2
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.1015.
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’).
4
For images of the church and its immediate setting, see Jeff Cotton, ‘Santa Lucia’, The Churches of Venice, http://www.churchesofvenice.co.uk/demolished.htm#santalucia.
5
Draft notes of 2010–11, Tate cataloguing files.
6
See also Warrell 1995, p.109, and Warrell 2003, pp.150, 264 note 3.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The North-West End of the Grand Canal, Venice, with the Churches of Santa Lucia, the Scalzi and San Simeone Piccolo, and San Geremia in the Distance 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-north-west-end-of-the-grand-canal-venice-with-the-r1203753, accessed 20 May 2025.