Joseph Mallord William Turner The Lagoon near Venice, at Sunset 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner,
The Lagoon near Venice, at Sunset
1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
The Lagoon near Venice, at Sunset 1840
D32162
Turner Bequest CCCXVI 25
Turner Bequest CCCXVI 25
Watercolour on white wove paper, 244 x 304 mm
Watermark ‘C Ansell | 1828’
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Inscribed by John Ruskin in blue ink ‘[...]5[...]’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCCXVI 25’ bottom right
Watermark ‘C Ansell | 1828’
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Inscribed by John Ruskin in blue ink ‘[...]5[...]’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCCXVI 25’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Exhibition history
1904
National Gallery, London, various dates to at least 1904 (70, as ‘Venice, from Fusina’).
1965
Display of watercolours from the Turner Bequest, Tate Gallery, London, ? – [?]March 1965 (no catalogue).
1966
Turner: Imagination and Reality, Museum of Modern Art, New York, March–May [June] 1966 (73, as ‘Sunset, Returning from Torcello’, ?1835, reproduced in colour).
1978
Watercolours from the Turner Bequest, Lent by the British Museum, Tate Gallery, London, January–June 1978 (no catalogue).
1982
J.M.W. Turner Watercolors from the British Museum, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, March–May 1982, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, May–July 1982 (68, as ‘Venice: Sunset’, 1840, reproduced).
1988
Summer Miscellany: Watercolours from the Turner Bequest, Tate Gallery, London, July–October 1988 (no catalogue).
1990
From Venice to the Alps: Watercolours from the Turner Bequest, Tate Gallery, London, April–June 1990 (no catalogue).
1995
Through Switzerland with Turner: Ruskin’s First Selection from the Turner Bequest, Tate Gallery, London, February–May 1995 (70, as ‘Venice (Venice: Looking across the Lagoon)’, 1840, reproduced in colour).
1996
Turner, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, March–June 1996, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, June–September 1996 (81, as ‘Venice: Looking across the Lagoon’, 1840, reproduced in colour).
2003
Turner and Venice, Tate Britain, London, October 2003–January 2004, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, February–May 2004, Museo Correr, Venice, September 2004–January 2005, Fundació ”la Caixa”, Barcelona, March–June 2005 (174, as ‘Looking across the Lagoon at Sunset’, c.1840, reproduced in colour; exhibited in London and Fort Worth only).
2004
TurnerWhistlerMonet, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, June–September 2004, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, October 2004–January 2005, Tate Britain, London, February–May 2005 (91, as ‘Venice: Looking across the Lagoon at Sunset’, 1840, reproduced in colour).
2007
Hockney on Turner Watercolours, Tate Britain, London, June 2007–February 2008 (no number, as ‘Venice: Looking across the Lagoon at Sunset’, 1840, reproduced in colour).
2018
Turner: Opere della Tate, Chiostro del Bramante, Rome, March–August 2018 (75, as ‘Venezia, veduta della laguna al tramonto’, 1840, reproduced in colour).
2018
J.M.W. Turner. Acuarelas: Tate Collection, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, September 2018–January 2019 (no number, as ‘Venice: Looking across the Lagoon at Sunset’, 1840, reproduced in colour).
References
1904
E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn eds., Library Edition: The Works of John Ruskin: Volume XIII: Turner: The Harbours of England; Catalogues and Notes, London 1904, pp.215, 373, 611 no.70, as ‘Venice, from Fusina’.
1909
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.1020, CCCXVI 25, as ‘Venice from Fusina. Exhibited Drawings, No.70, N.G.’.
1910
J[ohn] E[rnest] Phythian, Turner, London [1910], pp.104–5.
1930
A.J. Finberg, In Venice with Turner, London 1930, p.174, as ‘From Fusina’, 1835 or 1840.
1962
Martin Butlin, Turner Watercolours, London 1962, pp.6, 11, p.56 no.19, as ‘Venice from Fusina (?)’, pl.19 (colour).
1835
Lawrence Gowing, Turner: Imagination and Reality, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1966, reproduced in colour p.17, p.62 no.73, as ‘Sunset, Returning from Torcello’, ?1835.
1982
Lindsay Stainton in Stainton and Richard S. Schneiderman, J.M.W. Turner Watercolors from the British Museum, exhibition catalogue, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens 1982, p.69 no.68, as ‘Venice: Sunset’, 1840, reproduced.
1840
Lindsay Stainton, Turner’s Venice, London 1985, pp.26, 63 no.83, as ‘Venice from Fusina (?)’, ?1840, pl.83 (colour).
1995
Ian Warrell, Through Switzerland with Turner: Ruskin’s First Selection from the Turner Bequest, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1995, pp.115–16 no.70, as ‘Venice (Venice: Looking across the Lagoon)’, 1840, reproduced in colour.
1996
Michael Lloyd, Andrew Wilton, Evelyn Joll and others, Turner, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 1996, reproduced in colour p.149, p.234 no.81, as ‘Venice: Looking across the Lagoon’, 1840, reproduced in colour.
1840
Turner 1775 1851, Découvrons l’art, Paris 1996, pl.33 (colour), as ‘Venise, vue de Fusina’, ?1840.
1840
Richard P. Townsend, Andrew Wilton, David Blayney Brown and others, J.M.W. Turner: “That Greatest of Landscape Painters”: Watercolors from London Museums, exhibition catalogue, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa 1998, fig.27 (colour), as ‘Venice, Looking across the Lagoon’, 1840.
2000
Sam Smiles, J.M.W. Turner, British Artists, London 2000, p.10, fig.4 (colour), as ‘Venice: Looking across the Lagoon’, 1840.
2003
Bronwyn Ormsby, with Joyce H. Townsend, Brian Singer and John Dean, ‘Blake’s Use of Tempera in Context’, in Joyce H. Townsend (ed.), Robin Hamlyn and others, William Blake: The Painter at Work, London 2003, p.144.
1840
Ian Warrell in Warrell, David Laven, Jan Morris and others, Turner and Venice, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2003, pp.235–6, 259, 273 no.174, as ‘Looking across the Lagoon at Sunset’, c.1840, fig.259 (colour).
2004
Sarah Taft in Katharine Lochnan, Luce Abélès, John House and others, TurnerWhistlerMonet, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 2004, p.216 no.91, as ‘Venice: Looking across the Lagoon at Sunset’, 1840, reproduced in colour.
2007
David Blayney Brown, Turner Watercolours, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2007, reproduced in colour p.112, as ‘Venice: Looking across the Lagoon at Sunset’, 1840, and front cover (detail).
2012
Leo Costello, J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History, Farnham and Burlington 2012, pp.167, 168, pl.22 (colour), as ‘Venice: Looking across the Lagoon at sunset’, 1840.
2018
David Blayney Brown, Turner: Opere della Tate, exhibition catalogue, Chiostro del Bramante, Rome 2018, reproduced in colour p.127 no.75, as ‘Venezia, veduta della laguna al tramonto’, 1840, and front cover (detail).
2018
Andrés Duprat and David Blayney Brown, J.M.W. Turner. Acuarelas: Tate Collection, exhibition catalogue, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires 2018, reproduced in colour pp.[108] (detail) and 115, p.130, as ‘Venice: Looking across the Lagoon at Sunset’, 1840.
Noting the subject simply as ‘Venice’, in 1857 John Ruskin described the evocative setting: ‘Just after sunset. The position of the city is indicated by the touches of white in the vermilion cloud.’ He continued:
I cannot make out the long purple object like a wall in the middle distance. But I imagine, from the position of the sun, that the subject is a reminiscence of a return from Torcello towards Venice.
The clouds are remarkable as an example of Turner’s frequent practice of laying rich colour on a wet ground, and leaving it to gradate itself as it dried, a few subsequent touches being, in the present instance, added on the right hand. Although the boat in the centre seems a mere scrawl, the action of the gondolier (at the left-hand side) is perfectly given in his forward thrust.1
The ‘touches of white’ Ruskin noted are no longer readily apparent (compare the treatment of the distant city in Tate D32153; Turner Bequest CCCXVI 16), while the ‘purple wall’ seems rather to be simply one more band of strong colour among the rest, modifying the green sea where it meets the horizon below the orange of the sky. Given the lack of features except the posts marking a channel,2 his idea of a ‘reminiscence of a return from Torcello’, among the many islands in the Lagoon a few miles north-east of the city, is entirely conjectural since there are no confirmed Torcello views,3 albeit such a voyage would place the apparent sunset effect in a correspondingly westerly direction. In 1881 he fancifully called the subject ‘Farewell to Venice’,4 perhaps contrasting it with the ‘Approach’ shown in both D32153 and a related painting. Latterly, Leo Costello has taken the present work as evoking ‘a space of desolation and emptiness’, where the ‘city hovers as a ghostly presence on the horizon, which seems to be passing into nothingness with the setting sun’,5 in ‘a “recession from history”’ itself.6
Somehow, by the early twentieth century the work’s official title had become ‘Venice, from Fusina’,7 in which case the view would be to the east, with the glowing sky conventionally assumed to indicate dawn. Martin Butlin noted Ruskin’s original Torcello suggestion as in accord with the ‘sunset effect’,8 and Lindsay Stainton has concurred,9 calling it ‘an astonishing image’,10 and ‘one of those flaming Venetian sunsets which writers from Aretino [1492–1556] onwards had enthusiastically described but which, until Turner, no artist since the Renaissance had painted’.11 Turner’s inscription on the verso (D40157) appears to describe a sunset, which would seem to strengthen the case.12 While noting that there is ‘nothing there’ topographically, Ian Warrell has suggested nevertheless that such colours might have been observed in the eastern part of the sky around sunset.13
Describing the work among other Venetian colour studies as ‘impressionistic’ in the broadest sense, the art historian J.E. Phythian was particularly taken by the forceful palette, ‘with the rose, gold and orange in the sky made intensely luminous by the deep purple cloudlet dashed into the still wet wash of colour’.14 Butlin later characterised it as among ‘studies more in the abstract relationship of colours than the direct result of visual experience’,15 with its ‘heavily saturated tones’,16 ‘arranged in three bands, the lowest, the lagoon, in no way reflecting the sunset tints of the sky’, apparently ‘over an even simpler groundwork of a blue wash at the bottom, later painted over with green to represent water, and a pink one at the top, partly covered with the warm reds and yellows of the middle zone’.17 He noted ‘lay-ins’ of this kind elsewhere, for example in the 1819 Como and Venice sketchbook18 (see Tate D15261–D15262; Turner Bequest CLXXXI 10, 11).
Stainton has suggested that the ‘colours chosen may be a subconscious illustration of Turner’s understanding of colour science as expounded (not very clearly) in his Royal Academy lectures on perspective’ (see the ‘Perspective lectures c.1809–28’ section of this catalogue), with ‘positive colours’ being ‘“aerial” or light colours, not the local colours of objects’, while darkness was ‘“the privation of colour” and was obtained by mixing all the others’, as in the ‘mud-colour’ of the silhouetted foreground features.19 Warrell has described the colours in ‘several distinct fields, almost as if seen through a prism’,20 and has discussed several of these Lagoon subjects in relation to Turner’s later interest in Goethe’s colour theory21 (see the Introduction to this subsection), suggesting that Tate D36190 (Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 332), with its cooler colours, may show ‘the same setting under altered conditions’.22
Technical notes:
For comparison with the contemporary painting practice of William Blake (1757–1827), the present work and Turner’s 1830 Funeral of Sir Thomas Lawrence (Tate D25467; Turner Bequest CCLXIII 344) have been analysed and ‘the same Arabic and tragacanth gum mixture used by Blake was identified in each painting. Comparing these results suggests that Turner may have added gum tragacanth to his paints when the work required it’,1 when he needed a thicker layer to work over an existing wash without dissolving it.2 See the extended technique and condition notes by Helen Evans and Joyce Townsend appended to D25467.
This is one of numerous 1840 Venice works Ian Warrell has noted as on sheets of ‘white paper produced [under the name] Charles Ansell,3 each measuring around 24 x 30 cm, several watermarked with the date “1828”’:4 Tate D32138–D32139, D32141–D32143, D32145–D32147, D32154–D32163, D32167–D32168, D32170–D32177, D35980, D36190 (Turner Bequest CCCXVI 1, 2, 4–6, 8–10, 17–26, 30, 31, 33–40, CCCLXIV 137, 332). Warrell has also observed that The Doge’s Palace and Piazzetta, Venice (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin)5 and Venice: The New Moon (currently untraced)6 ‘may belong to this group’.7
Matthew Imms
September 2018
Albeit Peter Bower, Turner’s Later Papers: A Study of the Manufacture, Selection and Use of his Drawing Papers 1820–1851, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999, p.81, notes that the Muggeridge family had taken over after 1820, still using the ‘C Ansell’ watermark.
How to cite
Matthew Imms, ‘The Lagoon near Venice, at Sunset 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