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 Venice Canal Scenes, with a Bridge and a Tower 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Venice Canal Scenes, with a Bridge and a Tower’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 54 Verso:
Venice Canal Scenes, with a Bridge and a Tower 1840
D31897
Turner Bequest CCCXIII 54a
Pencil on cream wove paper, 123 x 173 mm
Partial watermark ‘tman’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
These slight drawings were made with the page turned horizontally. Finberg later annotated his generic 1909 Inventory entry (‘Distant buildings’): ‘Ponte di Rialto’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy in the same way.2 The main view possibly includes the imposing arcaded bridge on the Grand Canal, seen from the north-west, but the proportions of buildings appear wrong; compare for example a watercolour in the contemporary Grand Canal and Giudecca sketchbook (Tate D32119; Turner Bequest CCCXV 3). It may rather be a smaller structure with a balustrade.
The separate view of a building with a distant tower at the bottom left is continued across the gutter onto folio 55 recto opposite (D31398), where a small bridge is shown in the foreground.

Matthew Imms
September 2018

1
Undated MS note by Finberg (died 1939) in interleaved copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, opposite p.1011.
2
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.1011.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Venice Canal Scenes, with a Bridge and a Tower 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-venice-canal-scenes-with-a-bridge-and-a-tower-r1196792, accessed 26 April 2024.