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

The watercolour on the recto, Tate D32162 (Turner Bequest CCCXVI 25), is generally agreed to be a sunset view of the Lagoon near Venice, associated with Turner’s 1840 visit. This reading of the time of day depicted would seem to be confirmed by the lines confidently but often illegibly inscribed in pencil above the centre of this side (not recorded in Finberg’s 1909 Inventory1):

This reading is necessarily very tentative, even in terms of the unqualified words. Lindsay Stainton has suggested it may be a quotation, ‘which seems to refer to the setting sun’;2 James Hamilton suggested that if we ‘read in the first line the words “... gleam the last of the [..?..] ray” we are perhaps witnessing Turner’s final farewell to the crumbling city’, perhaps influenced by John Ruskin’s one-time title for the recto, ‘Farewell to Venice’. Similarly, Ian Warrell, having first noted the lines as being simply ‘about the sunset’,3 subsequently deciphered references to ‘towers illuminated by the last gleams of a setting sun, presumably musing on the fate of Venice’.4

Elsewhere in this grouping, a moonlit Lagoon scene, Tate D36192 (Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 334), has similarly fragmentary descriptive verse on the back (D40182); for a wider discussion of poetry in relation to Turner’s Venetian subjects, see the Introduction to this subsection.

Technical notes:

See under the recto (D32162) for the relationship of this sheet to numerous others used for Venetian subjects around 1840.