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 Shipping off the Riva degli Schiavoni, Venice, with the Church of Santa Maria della Pietà, and the Campanile of San Marco (St Mark's ) in the Distance; the Campanile of San Moisè 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Shipping off the Riva degli Schiavoni, Venice, with the Church of Santa Maria della Pietà, and the Campanile of San Marco (St Mark's ) in the Distance; the Campanile of San Moisè’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 10 Verso:
Shipping off the Riva degli Schiavoni, Venice, with the Church of Santa Maria della Pietà, and the Campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s ) in the Distance; the Campanile of San Moisè 1840
D31810
Turner Bequest CCCXIII 10a
Pencil on cream wove paper, 123 x 173 x 123 mm
Partial watermark ‘tman’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Shipping off the Molo’): ‘Riva degli Schiavoni. Campanile with scaffolding in distance’.1 With the page turned horizontally, the main view is to the west along the waterfront with much shipping moored in the Bacino. In the right foreground is the then unfinished classical façade of the Pietà church; see also folio 19 recto (D31827).
Turner had made a more detailed precise view from the same point in the 1819 Venice to Ancona sketchbook (Tate D14500; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 7). As on the previous occasion, the campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s) is shown in outline in the distance, this time with schematic bands of scaffolding, as Bell noted (an important aid to dating the 1840 drawings; see the tour’s Introduction).
At the bottom left are the upper levels of the campanile and the pedimented west front of the church of San Moisè, continued from the full-page view on folio 11 recto opposite (D31811).

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.1009.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Shipping off the Riva degli Schiavoni, Venice, with the Church of Santa Maria della Pietà, and the Campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s ) in the Distance; the Campanile of San Moisè 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-shipping-off-the-riva-degli-schiavoni-venice-with-the-church-r1196704, accessed 25 April 2024.