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

The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘View on Grand Canal (?)’), crossing out the question mark and adding ‘looking across at the Carità from near S. Samuele’.1 He also marked a copy of Finberg’s 1930 book In Venice with Turner to the same effect.2 The page’s title was amended by Ian Warrell to ‘Looking down the Grand Canal from the Traghetto di San Samuele, with the Palazzo Loredon and the Palazzo degli Scrigni on the Right’ in 2003, in connection with his concurrent Turner and Venice exhibition at Tate Britain.3 The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally.

The main view is southwards from the mid-point of the south-western reach of the Grand Canal, with boats off the Campo San Samuele in the left foreground, where the deck of a prominent floating ferry station is positioned today. The left half of the drawing is largely taken up with the north front of the Palazzo Malipiero, with its various arched windows and balconies overlooking the small square, interspersed with slightly projecting chimneys; the one nearest the canal has since been removed, and the wall is now blank between the windows at that point. An octagonal kiosk still stands where a hut or pavilion is shown at the bottom left.

Although the Gothic tracery on the right, picked out along the selectively detailed run of palaces to the south-west, might be taken as that of the nearby Palazzo Loredan, it seems rather to indicate the similar fenestration of the right-hand half of the continuous Palazzi Contarini degli Scrigni e Corfu, with the chimneys of its Rio di San Trovaso side to the right, and the round-headed windows of the classical portion to the left, all crowned by its prominent rooftop turret, seen from the east on folio 89 recto (D32093).4 In the distance at the centre, the three rounded gables mark the north-western end of the former Santa Maria della Carità church, by then part of the Accademia, overlooking the Campo della Carità (the viewpoint for a prospect east towards the entrance of the canal on folio 87 recto; D32090). There are sketches looking back in this direction on folios 86 recto and verso (D32088–D32089), and a study of the canal elevation of the Malipiero and the adjacent campanile of San Samuele on folio 85 verso (D32087).

At the bottom right is a continuation of the horizontal sketch on folio 4 recto opposite (D31934), showing the northward view into the Piazza San Marco (St Mark’s Square), with the basilica on the right; its domes and pinnacles are carried over the lower third of the present page. Two slight verticals at the bottom left here indicate the corners of the eastern face of the campanile. As Warrell has noted, adjacent pages also show views around St Mark’s, making the present Grand Canal subject likely an interpolation on a subsequent occasion;5 compare the top view of four on folio 76 verso (D32070). For the book’s somewhat convoluted general sequence, see its Introduction.