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

This composition is on blue wove paper, visible in small patches at the lower edges where it functions as a pale blue. The deeper blue sky was painted with a transparent wash of ultramarine. In the rest of the painting several layers of coloured gouache have been used, followed by thin washes of watercolour. The buildings are painted in white gouache with grey detailing. X-radiography of the sheet indicates that the gouache was made from lead white. Turner was an early user of lead white in gouache, and by the middle of the nineteenth century other artists were also using it regularly. Lead white in scanty amounts of gum water as Turner used it, can easily discolour to a speckled or solid dark brown when it reacts with hydrogen sulphide gas, a common urban pollutant during the nineteenth century. Here, the gouache is in excellent condition.

The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘On the Cross-Canal, between Bridge of Sighs and Rialto’): ‘Ponte della Guerra and Palazzo Tasca-Papafava &c’.1 These stand on the winding Rio de San Zulian south-east of the Rialto, with an imposing entrance arch flanked by Ionic columns off the short quay north of the bridge, now leading to Instituto San Giuseppe, although the resemblance to Turner’s composition, with a similar feature at the centre, is only generic. Nevertheless, it was exhibited and published in line with Bell’s note2 until being correctly identified by Ian Warrell in 2003.3

In fact, the view is north-west along the Rio di San Luca, towards its entrance into the Grand Canal west of the Rialto Bridge. Turner had first recorded the view along the narrow canal in pencil in the 1819 Milan to Venice sketchbook (Tate D14486; Turner Bequest CLXXV 89a).4 The imposing central block is the back of the Palazzo Grimani, with the elaborate entrance to its small courtyard beside the canal. The pilastered west end of the church of San Luca is shown towards the right, although the bridge aligned just to the right (south) of its central door is not hinted at. It appears as a simple stone or rendered arch (it is now a steel structure known as the Ponte del Teatro) spanning the middle distance in a variant colour study on grey paper (D32215; CCCXVII 30), which has a detailed pencil drawing of much the same scene, albeit without the bridge, on its verso (D40159). See under D32215 for other views of the palace.

As Warrell has noted, even in the pencil study the artist ‘took considerable licence with perspective, and encompassed what amounts to two viewpoints by ingeniously extending the parameters of his image beyond what the human eye can take in.’7

Without further elaboration, in 1881 John Ruskin categorised this work among twenty-five Turner Bequest subjects ‘chiefly in Venice. Late time, extravagant, and showing some of the painter’s worst and final faults; but also, some of his peculiar gifts in a supreme degree.’8 In an unpublished catalogue of 1880 he included it as one of a smaller ‘Glorious grey [paper] group’.9 Andrew Wilton has observed, with the present work in mind: ‘it is astonishing how much clear architectural information is to be found even in some of the most atmospheric of the late Venetian studies’.10

As well as producing many original watercolour views of Venice, the widely travelled watercolourist Hercules Brabazon Brabazon (1821–1906) was in the habit of making sympathetic if often rather loose transcriptions from earlier artists he admired. He copied several examples from Turner’s 1840 visit in the Bequest, including this one;11 see also under Tate D32126, D32154, D32156, D32207, D32209 (Turner Bequest CCCXV 10, CCCXVI 17, 19, CCCXVII 22, 24).

Technical notes:

The dense white gouache has been applied quite thickly in places to suggest intense sunlight, especially at the corner of the smaller building to the left of the church.

The sheet is not included in Ian Warrell’s near-comprehensive technical appendix of the papers linked to Turner’s Venice visits in Turner and Venice, compiled with assistance from paper conservator Peter Bower,1 although it is discussed in the main text, as a ‘piece of [English] Bally, Ellen and Steart’s blue drawing-paper, that he had recently used for drawings of Bregenz on his way to Venice’.2 Many other Venice subjects are on that maker’s grey sheets, including Tate D32215 (Turner Bequest CCCXVII 30), the related colour study discussed above. For four dispersed Bregenz watercolours, see under Tate D32266 (Turner Bequest CCCXX 2a) in the Rotterdam to Venice sketchbook; however, Bower subsequently found that the paper for at least two of them is apparently of continental manufacture and likely ‘German or Dutch’.3

Verso:

Blank; inscribed in pencil ‘32’ above right of centre, ascending vertically; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram over ‘CCCXVII – 31’ towards bottom left.