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

The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Bridge on the Riva degli Schiavone’): ‘Perhaps meant for the Ponte della Cà di Dio but quite impossible’.1 In 1857 John Ruskin had called the composition ‘Bridge over the Rio dell’ Arsenale’,2 the next side canal east along the quays continuing from the Riva degli Schiavoni. In either case the view would be south-south-west over the Canale di San Marco towards the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore and its distinctive church. Instead, turning all but ninety degrees,3 the distant prospect is westwards along the curving waterfront to the Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace), with the campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s) rising beyond it in the haze. Aligned above the foreground arch, there seem to be faint indication of the domes of Santa Maria della Salute,4 almost lost in the colour of the surrounding sky.

Assuming the loosely rendered foreground is intended to represent a particular bridge and its setting,5 the building just to the west of the Ponte Ca’ di Dio, now the Ristorante Carpaccio, has a chimney stack projecting from the first floor upwards like the one shown on the right here; compare the detailed drawing of the building in the 1819 Venice to Ancona sketchbook (Tate D14504; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 9). The Ponte dell’Arsenale is a somewhat grander structure, crowned by four stone obelisks, and plainer buildings to either side. Another possibility is the Ponte della Veneta Marina, over the Rio della Tana, as subsequently suggested by Finberg;6 the next bridge to the east again, it is flanked by more varied buildings, including one with a projecting chimney to its west, and another with a dormer window or small penthouse opposite.

As G.S. Sandilands remarked in his brief survey of Turner’s watercolours: ‘The buildings are given character by what seems to be quite a casual scrawl. (Here, it should be noted that it would be unwise to accept as casual any of Turner’s scrawls. People who have visited places years after they were painted by Turner have been able to identify them from some apparently inconsequential brushmark.)’ Meanwhile, and perhaps equally to the point, he called the ‘bridge itself is a dream-structure within a dream’.7 J. Isaacs has described the structures as ‘solidified out of space by a Rembrandt-like scaffolding’,8 using ‘emphatic strokes of a brush charged with black wash’, as Lindsay Stainton noted.9 and Andrew Wilton observed: ‘Despite this perfunctoriness, the whole view has a luminosity that is characteristic of these drawings, making use, as they do to an unparalleled degree, of the whiteness of the paper to achieve an effect of all-pervasive light’.10

Ian Warrell has described the present study as among those likely derived from Canaletto’s panoramic Bacino compositions.11 He has noted Ruskin’s grouping of ‘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’: Tate D32120 (Turner Bequest CCCXV 4) from the contemporary Grand Canal and Giudecca sketchbook, and D32157–D32160 (CCCXVI 20–23) in the present grouping,12 to which Warrell added D32167 and D32168 (CCCXVI 30, 31),13 linked by ‘the brilliant sunshine refracted by the surface of the Bacino’,14 which is of more concern than topographical accuracy. He has noted that Turner ‘took similar liberties’15 with the foreground of his oil painting Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom-House, Venice: Canaletti painting, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1833 (Tate N00370).16 Such plausible distortions and variations are in the tradition of the landscape capriccio mode, combining real elements in new juxtapositions or with imaginary elements, sometimes employed by Venetian artists such as Canaletto and Guardi.

Ruskin regarded this as a ‘companion’ to D32159 (CCCXVI 22), showing another gondola at what he thought was the same bridge:

Technical notes:

This is one of numerous 1840 Venice works Ian Warrell has noted as on sheets of ‘white paper produced [under the name] Charles Ansell,1 each measuring around 24 x 30 cm, several watermarked with the date “1828”’:2 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)3 and Venice: The New Moon (currently untraced)4 ‘may belong to this group’.5

Verso:

Blank; inscribed in pencil ‘59’ top left, and ‘23’ bottom left (latter upside down): stamped in black ‘CCCXVI-23’ over Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom centre; inscribed in pencil ‘CCCXVI. 23’ towards bottom right.