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 The Rio della Tana below the Perimeter Walls of the Arsenale 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Rio della Tana below the Perimeter Walls of the Arsenale’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 44 Verso:
The Rio della Tana below the Perimeter Walls of the Arsenale 1840
D31877
Turner Bequest CCCXIII 44a
Pencil on cream wove paper, 123 x 173 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘C[... ?L...]’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This loose, rapid drawing, with associated details, was made with the page turned horizontally. Finberg later annotated his 1909 Inventory entries (both ‘Buildings from Canal’) for this page and folio 45 recto opposite (D31878): ‘Too rough for identification’.1 He subsequently added: ‘Rio di San Danieli CFB’.2 The initials are those of Turner scholar C.F. Bell, who marked another copy in the same way.3
The view appears to be eastwards from the slight bend to the right half-way along the Rio della Tana, east of the centre of Venice; the high brick perimeter wall of the Arsenale naval shipyards facing lower houses, and its tower at the corner of the Rio San Daniele looms in the distance. Compare Turner’s atmospheric contemporary watercolour, seemingly based on the view north up the Rio San Daniele (Tate D32164; Turner Bequest CCCXVI 27), with the base of the tower in the left foreground; as discussed in that work’s entry, he may not have lingered long around the perimeter of what was then an active Austrian military installation, only having made a handful of drawings on his previous visits to Venice.
Folio 45 recto opposite (D31878) shows a similarly hasty view from the other end of the Rio San Daniele, towards the church of San Pietro di Castello, and folios 46 recto and verso and 47 recto (D31880–D31882) likely show the church and its vicinity.

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, p.1011.
2
Ibid.
3
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, ‘The Rio della Tana below the Perimeter Walls of the Arsenale 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-the-rio-della-tana-below-the-perimeter-walls-of-the-arsenale-r1196772, accessed 24 April 2025.