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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > First Italian Tour 1819-20 > Milan to Venice Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Grand Canal, Venice, with the Entrance to the Cannaregio Canal beside the Church of San Geremia 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Grand Canal, Venice, with the Entrance to the Cannaregio Canal beside the Church of San Geremia’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 89 Recto:
The Grand Canal, Venice, with the Entrance to the Cannaregio Canal beside the Church of San Geremia 1819
D14483
Turner Bequest CLXXV 88
Pencil on white wove paper, 112 x 185 mm
Partial watermark ‘Al | 18’
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘P Labia’ towards top left, and ‘Ponte Canaregio’ bottom centre
Inscribed by John Ruskin in blue ink ‘88’ top right and ‘300’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CLXXV ’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘In the Cannaregio, with the Palazzo Labia and S. Geremia on the left, with the Ghetto in distance; also group of gondolas’): ‘Ponte delle Guglie in the middle’.1 Bell similarly marked the entry in Finberg’s 1930 In Venice with Turner.2
Looking north from the Grand Canal along the Riva di Biasio, the view continues across most of folio 88 verso opposite (D14482; Turner Bequest CLXXV 87a), where the church of San Geremia is shown. The statue below it, seen on the left here, occupies a similar position today, but the balustrade and steps have been replaced. Above rises the Palazzo Labia, as labelled by Turner, facing the Cannaregio Canal, with the Ponte delle Guglie just beyond. The general arrangement of the buildings beyond and in the right foreground remains much the same, the tallest one shown complete being the Palazzo Emo a San Leonardo.
Finberg noted that this view and a few others on adjacent pages around the north-western end of the Grand Canal ‘complete Turner’s studies of this part of Venice’.3 For other drawings made in the vicinity and an overview of Turner’s coverage of Venice, see the sketchbook’s Introduction.

Matthew Imms
March 2017

1
Undated MS note by C.F. Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, I, p.515.
2
Undated MS note by Bell (before 1936) in copy of Finberg 1930, Prints and Drawings Study Room, British Museum, London, p.166, as transcribed by Ian Warrell (undated notes, Tate catalogue files).
3
Finberg 1930, p.53.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Grand Canal, Venice, with the Entrance to the Cannaregio Canal beside the Church of San Geremia 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2017, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, July 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-grand-canal-venice-with-the-entrance-to-the-cannaregio-r1186596, accessed 29 April 2025.