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 Nave of the Basilica of San Marco (St Mark's), Venice 1840

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Nave of the Basilica of San Marco (St Mark's), Venice’ 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 11 Verso:
The Nave of the Basilica of San Marco (St Mark’s), Venice 1840
D31812
Turner Bequest CCCXIII 11a
Pencil on cream wove paper, 123 x 173 mm
Partial watermark ‘J. Wh’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Finberg later annotated his basic 1909 Inventory entry (‘An interior’): ‘St Marks’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy in more detail: ‘St Mark’s looking across the nave’.2 The slight study, made with the page turned horizontally, has enough detail to indicate that the view is north across the nave west of the central crossing, where open arcades support galleries spanning the broad arches which are out of sight beyond the upper edge here.
Compare one of the handful of contemporary watercolour studies of St Mark’s interiors on grey-brown paper (Tate D32252; Turner Bequest CCCXIX 4).

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, opposite p.1009.
2
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.1009.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Nave of the Basilica of San Marco (St Mark’s), Venice 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-nave-of-the-basilica-of-san-marco-st-marks-venice-r1196706, accessed 24 November 2024.