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

Finberg later annotated his 1909 Inventory entry (‘Distant buildings’): ‘2 sk[etches] on Lagoon – at back of S. Giorgio’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy beside the entries for folios 40 recto–42 recto (D31868–D31872): ‘All views from gondola. The Campanile always scaffolded’.2 The latter observation is important in dating this sketchbook to 1840, as discussed in the tour’s Introduction.

With the page turned horizontally, there are two similar views here, inverted relative to each other. Each shows the prospect north across the Bacino through the Canale della Grazia between the Isola della Giudecca on the left and the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore on the right. Towards the gutter, the view includes the monastery buildings and church of San Giorgio on the right, and the domes of Santa Maria della Salute and the campanile of San Marco beyond the low Giudecca boatyards on the left. The ‘canal Orfano’ mentioned by Finberg in relation to folios 40 recto–44 recto (D31868–D31876)3 runs south of the islands in the more open waters of the Lagoon not far from this viewpoint.

The other way up at the outer edge is a similar view, featuring a thermal window at the southern end of a monastery building running this way from the cloisters which remains in place. Compare the two-part sketch on folio 29 recto (D31846), one of the sketches on folio 41 recto opposite (D31870), and a contemporary watercolour showing the view to St Mark’s though the channel (Tate D32156; Turner Bequest CCCXVI 19).