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

The drawing is inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation. Folios 59 recto and verso, 60 verso and 61 recto (D14427–D14428, D14430–D14431) form a continuous panoramic west view across the Bacino, from the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore to the south to the Riva San Biagio to the north; Turner would have had to temporarily turn back D14430 and D14428 to match their outer edges to the points were the overall view continued.1

The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry for this page (‘Riva degli Schiavone [sic], with St. Mark’s and Zachary’s’): ‘Pietà in the middle’.2 Finberg later expanded: ‘Riva degli Schiavoni from the Basin of S. Mark, the Ospizio della Pietà in the centre, with S. Zaccaria above, the domes of S. Mark’s on the left, and the tower of S. Francesco della Vigna on the right’.3 The south front of Santa Maria della Pietà then still lacked the upper levels of its classical façade; compare a closer view in the contemporary Venice to Ancona sketchbook (Tate D14500; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 7). The dome above it is that of San Zaccaria, to its north-west. The spire of San Francesco is at the outer edge, with the campanile of the nearer San Martino near the entrance to the Arsenale to its left. Also at the outer edge is half of the Ponte San Biasio, continued half way across the recto (D14427).

When this leaf was rebound and stamped after being displayed in the nineteenth century, Finberg’s 1909 Inventory sequence, clear from his descriptive titles for the recto and verso, was disrupted. What is now the recto (D14427) was, by the implication of an ‘a’ suffix in his Inventory, the verso in his estimation, but it has since been bound as the recto and stamped as ‘59’. The present page 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.

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

Technical notes:

Finberg noted ‘do’ (i.e. ditto) next to this page in a copy of his 1909 Inventory, in relation to a preceding note, ‘stained by flood 29/8/29’,1 reporting on its condition following the Tate Gallery flood of January 1928.