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

Looking west over the Bacino off the Riva degli Schiavoni, perhaps about level with the church of the Pietà, the domes of Santa Maria della Salute appear at the far left overlooking the entrance to the Grand Canal.1 The reddish vertical accent towards the right may indicate the campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s).2 If the pale form immediately to the right of the Salute is intended as the porch of the Dogana, this would make the viewpoint quite far south from the Riva, off the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, although topographical accuracy is less important here than the atmospheric effect of the pink and blue clouds against the pale sky; in 1857 John Ruskin limited his commentary to: ‘Head of the Grand Canal. Afternoon. Bad weather coming on.’3 In his 1881 notes the title became ‘San Giorgio’,4 perhaps reflecting his sense of the viewpoint.

Ian Warrell has noted that Ruskin associated the subject with other 1840 subjects as ‘a series of views along the rambling Riva degli Schiavoni, which suggests that Turner explored its length by foot, as well as from the water’ (see also Tate D32157–D32160; Turner Bequest CCCXVI 20–23).5 Andrew Wilton has likened the ‘mood and treatment’ here to those of other pages from this sketchbook showing the broad reaches of the Canale della Giudecca (D32127–D32129; CCCXV 11–13).6

Warrell has compared the palette with that of the watercolour The Sun of Venice: Bragozzi Moored off the Riva degli Schiavoni (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh),7 a technically similar page associated with the notional contemporary ‘Storm’ sketchbook (see the Introduction to the present sketchbook). This may indicate that ‘in some instances Turner worked on an image in both books simultaneously, allowing his colours to dry as he went back and forth between the two’;8 Warrell notes that the overall effect of the Bequest work is ‘generalised and indistinct’, qualities it shares, along with the Salute in the same position and colours on the left, with the backdrop of the Edinburgh sheet (where the church seems darker by contrast against a clear sky), otherwise characterised by the greater detail of its shipping.9

In discussing the light and shade Turner evoked through colour, John Gage observed his use of habitual ‘contrast through the opposition, not of complimentaries, but of warm and cool colours’;10 despite the artist’s possible reference to ‘complementary shadows’, ‘the only striking examples’ Gage had come across were in the present watercolour, with ‘pink light on the buildings on the left, with a viridian watershadow’ and the painting of the Depositing of John Bellini’s Three Pictures in la Chiesa Redentore, Venice, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1841 (private collection;11 engraved in 1858: Tate impression T05192).12

There is a copy of this work on the same scale, datable to after 1880 (Indianapolis Museum of Art), by Ruskin’s protégé William Ward (1829–1908), who made many such near-facsimiles of Turner Bequest watercolours.13

Verso:

There is a dash of yellow colour at the top right, grey splashes at the bottom left, and rubbed grey at the centre left, likely associated with watercolour work on Tate D32121 (Turner Bequest CCCXV 5) or whichever page of the totally dismembered sketchbook was originally bound opposite.

Otherwise blank; inscribed by John Ruskin in pencil ‘JR’ bottom left; inscribed in pencil ‘3’ centre; inscribed in pencil ‘N.G. 60’ bottom centre; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram over ‘CCCXV – 4’ bottom left.