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

The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Lagoon behind S. Giorgio and the Cantieri’), placing everything but the first word in square brackets: ‘Anywhere, wildly fantastic’.1 The title followed was unchanged from that in John Ruskin’s 1857 catalogue of exhibited Turner Bequest works,2 and the subject has remained somewhat resistant to identification. ‘Cantieri’ (or ‘cantiere’) means boat- or shipyard in Italian; in 1930 Finberg dropped the last three words in his revised listing of Venice subjects,3 and Bell commented again: ‘an imaginative fantasy’.4

There are old yards on the east side of the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, away from the island’s church, but the boats, including skeletal two or three-masted vessels silhouetted on the left apparently under construction or partly dismantled, seem to be in open water, with gondolas passing among the loosely defined brown forms of smaller craft in the foreground. There may be a connection with a page of pencil studies of shipping off San Giorgio in the contemporary Venice and Botzen sketchbook (Tate D31875; Turner Bequest CCCXIII 43a).

Ian Warrell described the present study as among those likely derived from Canaletto’s panoramic Bacino compositions.5 He has noted Ruskin’s grouping of ‘a series of views along the rambling Riva degli Schiavoni, which suggests that Turner explored its length by foot, as well as from the water’: Tate D32120 (Turner Bequest CCCXV 4) from 1840’s Grand Canal and Giudecca book, and D32157–D32160 (CCCXVI 20–23) in the present grouping,6 to which Warrell added D32167 (CCCXVI 30) and the present sheet,7 linked by ‘the brilliant sunshine refracted by the surface of the Bacino’.8

Of these, D32157 (CCCXVI 20) is the closest to the present work in its colour and unresolved handling, although its backdrop is clearly a view westwards along the Riva degli Schiavoni waterfront towards the domes of Santa Maria della Salute and the unmistakeable campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s).9 Andrew Wilton suggested that the two ‘make use of a rather cooler colour range than usual’ in the Venice waterfront studies, as compared with D32155 or D32158 (CCCXVI 18, 21) for example, and ‘detail is very slightly and nervously indicated’.10 Lindsay Stainton argued that here the ‘topographical element ... is of minor importance. ... The summary yet expressive treatment of the boats, the brilliance of the blue-green water and the blaze of clear light are the most striking features’.11

Nevertheless, Richard P. Townsend made a somewhat tentative attempt to settle the issue, suggesting that the composition ‘appears to show the church of San Giorgio Maggiore on the island of San Giorgio, its campanile and the cantieri, or shipyards, of Venice to the right of the church. The tower of another church, presumably on the Giudecca behind and to the right of San Giorgio, rises in the distance’, and that Turner ‘could have taken it from a gondola or from the Riva’.12 When the work was exhibited in 2008–9, it was described as showing shipping moored off the Riva.13

Technical notes:

The spire towards the right has been washed out; the band of waterfront buildings was otherwise reserved, with details added with fine strokes of colour. What may be a figure in one of the brown boats at the left has been scratched out.

In 1857 John Ruskin’s commentary on this and Tate D32168 (Turner Bequest CCCXVI 31) was limited to calling them ‘leaves from his last sketch-book at Venice’,1 although each was actually always separate. They are among numerous 1840 Venice works Ian Warrell has noted as on sheets of ‘white paper produced [under the name] Charles Ansell,2 each measuring around 24 x 30 cm, several watermarked with the date “1828”’:3 Tate D32138–D32139, D32141–D32143, D32145–D32147, D32154–D32163, D32167–D32168, D32170–D32177, D35980, D36190 (Turner Bequest CCCXVI 1, 2, 4–6, 8–10, 17–26, 30, 31, 33–40, CCCLXIV 137, 332). Warrell has also observed that The Doge’s Palace and Piazzetta, Venice (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin)4 and Venice: The New Moon (currently untraced)5 ‘may belong to this group’.6

Verso:

Blank; inscribed in pencil ‘22’ bottom left, upside down, and ‘587B’ below right of centre; stamped in black ‘CCCXVI – 31’ over Turner Bequest monogram bottom centre; inscribed in pencil ‘D.32168’ bottom left.