Joseph Mallord William Turner Figures in the Piazzetta, Venice, at Night, with the Basilica and Campanile of San Marco (St Mark's) 1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner,
Figures in the Piazzetta, Venice, at Night, with the Basilica and Campanile of San Marco (St Mark's)
1840
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Figures in the Piazzetta, Venice, at Night, with the Basilica and Campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s) 1840
D32220
Turner Bequest CCCXVIII 1
Turner Bequest CCCXVIII 1
Watercolour and gouache on grey-brown wove paper, 150 x 228 mm
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCCXVIII – 1’ bottom right
Blind-stamped with Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCCXVIII – 1’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Exhibition history
1869
First Loan Collection selected from the Turner Bequest, various venues and dates 1869–before 1909 (no catalogue but numbered 97, as ‘St Mark’s, Venice (Colour, on brown)’).
1922
Original Drawings in Watercolour, Etc., by J.M.W. Turner, R.A., T. Girtin and E. Dayes. Lent by the Trustees of the National Gallery, Laing Art Gallery and Museum, Newcastle 1922 (26, as ‘St. Mark’s, Venice’).
1966
Turner Watercolours, Arts Centre, Folkestone, January–February 1966 (no catalogue).
1972
Director’s Study, British Museum, London, September 1972 (no catalogue).
1975
Turner in the British Museum: Drawings and Watercolours, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London, May 1975–February 1976 (216, as ‘Venice: The Piazza of St Mark’s’, 1840, reproduced).
1978
Търнър, Shipka Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria, April[?–May] 1978, Belgrade, Serbia [former Yugoslavia], May 1978, Muzeul de Arte al RS [Republica Socialista] Romania, Bucharest, June–July 1978 (57).
1978
Watercolours from the Turner Bequest, Lent by the British Museum, Tate Gallery, London, January–June 1978 (no catalogue).
1981
J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) / ΤΖ.Μ.Γ. Τερνερ (1775–1851), National Pinakothiki, Athens, January–March 1981 (53, as ‘Venice: the Piazza of St Mark’s’, ?1840, reproduced in colour).
1983
Turner and the Human Figure: Watercolours from the Turner Bequest, Loaned by the British Museum, Tate Gallery, London, December 1983–July 1984 (no catalogue).
1992
Turner and Byron, Tate Gallery, London, June–September 1992 (100, as ‘Venice: The Piazzetta and St Mark’s, Night’, c.1833–5, reproduced).
1997
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna, March–June 1997 (86, as ‘Venice: The Piazzetta and St. Mark’s, Night’, c.1833–5, reproduced in colour).
1997
J.M.W. Turner 1775–1851: A Tate Gallery Collection Exhibition, Yokohama Museum of Art, June–August 1997, Fukuoka Art Museum, September–October 1997, Nagoya City Art Museum, October–December 1997 (77, as ‘Venice: the Piazzetta and St. Mark’s, Night’, c.1833–5, 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 (130, as ‘The Piazzetta, with San Marco and its Campanile; Night’, 1840, reproduced in colour).
2008
Venice: From Canaletto and Turner to Monet, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, September 2008–February 2009 (no number, as ‘The Piazzetta, with San Marco and its Campanile; Night’, 1840, reproduced in colour).
2014
Late Turner: Painting Set Free, Tate Britain, London, September 2014–January 2015, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, February–May 2015, de Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, June–September 2015, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, October 2015–January 2016 (58, as ‘Venice: The Piazzetta, with San Marco and its Campanile; Night’, 1840, reproduced in colour; exhibited in London only).
References
1909
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.II, p.1026, CCCXVIII 1, as ‘St. Mark’s, Venice. 1st Loan Collection, No.97’, p.1029, CCCXIX 11, as ‘St. Mark’s. 1st Loan Collection, No.97’.
1922
Catalogue of Original Drawings in Watercolour, Etc., by J.M.W. Turner, R.A., T. Girtin and E. Dayes. Lent by the Trustees of the National Gallery, exhibition catalogue, Laing Art Gallery and Museum, Newcastle 1922, p.8 no.26, as ‘St. Mark’s, Venice’.
1930
A.J. Finberg, In Venice with Turner, London 1930, p.175, CCCXVIII 1, as ‘S. Mark’s’, probably 1835, p.176, CCCXIX 11, as ‘Duplicate entry, now cancelled’.
1975
Andrew Wilton, Turner in the British Museum: Drawings and Watercolours, exhibition catalogue, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London 1975, p.134 no.216, as ‘Venice: The Piazza of St Mark’s’, 1840, reproduced p.135.
1978
Timothy Clifford, Търнър, exhibition catalogue, Shipka Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria 1978, p.[26] no.57, as ‘CCCXVII–1’.
1840
Dimitrios Papastamos, John Gage and Lindsay Stainton, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) / ΤΖ.Μ.Γ. Τερνερ (1775–1851), exhibition catalogue, National Pinakothiki, Athens 1981, reproduced in colour p.134, pp.135–6 no.53, as ‘Venice: the Piazza of St Mark’s’, ?1840, reproduced in colour.
1833
Lindsay Stainton, Turner’s Venice, London 1985, p.45 no.8, as ‘St Mark’s from the Piazzetta’, ?1833, pl.8 (colour).
1991
Ian Warrell, ‘R.N. Wornum and the First Three Loan Collections: A History of the Early Display of the Turner Bequest outside London’, Turner Studies, vol.11, no.1, Summer 1991, p.41 no.97, as ‘St Mark’s, Venice (Colour, on brown)’.
1833
David Blayney Brown, Turner and Byron, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1992, p.127 no.100, as ‘Venice: The Piazzetta and St Mark’s, Night’, c.1833–5, reproduced.
1833
David Blayney Brown in Brown, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Evelyn Benesch and others, Joseph Mallord William Turner, exhibition catalogue, Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna 1997, p.284 no.86, as ‘Venice: The Piazzetta and St. Mark’s, Night’, c.1833–5, reproduced in colour p.285.
1833
David B[layney] Brown, Yasuhide Shimbata and Hideko Numata,J.M.W. Turner 1775–1851: A Tate Gallery Collection Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, Yokohama Museum of Art 1997, p.142 no.77, as ‘Venice: the Piazzetta and St. Mark’s, Night’, c.1833–5, reproduced in colour.
1840
Sam Smiles, J.M.W. Turner, British Artists, London 2000, fig.42 (colour), as ‘St Mark’s from the Piazzetta’, ?1840.
1833
Inge Herold, Turner on Tour, Munich and New York 1997, reproduced in colour p.81, as ‘Venice: The Piazzetta and St Mark’s, Night’, c.1833–5, p.85.
2003
Ian Warrell in Warrell, David Laven, Jan Morris and others, Turner and Venice, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2003, pp.119, 125–6, 259, 264 note 8, 272 no.130, as ‘The Piazzetta, with San Marco and its Campanile; Night’, 1840, fig.123 (colour).
2005
Ian Warrell, Cecilia Powell and David Laven, Turner i Venècia, exhibition catalogue, Fundació ”la Caixa”, Barcelona 2005, p.108 no.37, as ‘La Piazzetta, amb San Marco i el Campanile, a la nit’, 1840, reproduced in colour.
2008
Ian Warrell in Martin Schwander, Bożena Anna Kowalczyk, Warrell and others, Venice: From Canaletto and Turner to Monet, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen 2008, p.62, reproduced in colour p.80, p.220, as ‘The Piazzetta, with San Marco and its Campanile; Night’, 1840.
2014
Nicola Moorby in David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Sam Smiles (eds.), Late Turner: Painting Set Free, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2014, pp.109–10 no.58, as ‘Venice: The Piazzetta, with San Marco and its Campanile; Night’, 1840, reproduced in colour.
From the south end of the Piazzetta, the view in this night scene is north-north-west towards the Torre dell’Orologio at the centre, flanked by the Libreria Sansoviniana and the campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s) on the left, and the domed Basilica beyond the Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace) on the right. It is a deliberately ‘pictorial’, atmospheric treatment of a scene very familiar to Turner, with various incidental inaccuracies compared with his detailed pencil records over the years, such as Tate D14399 (Turner Bequest CLXXV 45) in the 1819 Milan to Venice sketchbook. Andrew Wilton has suggested a connection with a looser pencil sketch from much the same angle in the 1840 Venice and Botzen book (Tate D31814; Turner Bequest CCCXIII 12a),1 and remarked on the ‘theatrical quality of the composition and the lighting’, comparable with the dramatic contemporary watercolour Lightning in the Piazzetta (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh).2
The present scene is, as Ian Warrell has put it, ‘given an unfamiliar air of fantasy by the transforming qualities of moonlight’3 from behind the viewer, illuminating a crowd towards the left, including one or two in strongly marked red costumes and flecks of other bright colours among the blue shadows, perhaps in Wilton’s view ‘consciously recalling the Venetian views of Canaletto or Guardi’4 and ‘enlivened in a ghostly manner through chiaroscuro contrasts’ as Inge Herold observed.5 Compare the bright touches here and there in some of the shadowy figure scenes and interiors in a parallel Venice subsection of this catalogue.
Lindsay Stainton has further suggested that Turner shows a ‘procession of figures apparently dressed in the red Senatorial robes of pre-Revolutionary Venice’, contrasted with the reality of the silhouette of the lone Austrian sentry by the striped sentry box and cannon below the palace on the right.6 With reference to Lord Byron’s poetry, which did so much to shape his generation’s attitude to the city, David Blayney Brown has remarked that this was ‘doubtless done no more than observe contemporary fact ... but the inevitable contrast between the city’s past and its debased present makes this a thoroughly Byronic image.’7 The box is shown again in a contemporary colour study of the palace and Piazzetta from the Bacino (Tate D32180; Turner Bequest CCCXVIII 1).8
The composition has echoes of the ambitious oil painting Juliet and her Nurse, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1836 (private collection; engraved in 1842 as ‘St Mark’s Place, Venice’: Tate impression T05188),9 with its night-time revellers crowding the Piazza. Ian Warrell has linked the present work with three similar grey-brown sheets showing evening or night views from the main square, looking past the campanile down the Piazzetta towards the viewpoint here (Tate D32250, D32256, D32258; Turner Bequest CCCXIX 2, 8, 10).10
This sheet was inadvertently listed twice in Finberg’s 1909 Inventory;11 the second instance, Turner Bequest CCCXIX 11,12 was initially assigned the subsequently cancelled Tate accession number D32259. The confusion appears to have arisen owing to the work’s long circulation as part of the First Loan Collection from the Bequest, as one of the ‘few of Turner’s “brown paper” series ... considered worthy of being exhibited until comparatively recently’, as Warrell has noted.13
Technical notes:
This is one of numerous 1840 Venice works Ian Warrell has noted as being on ‘Grey-brown paper produced by an unknown maker (possibly ... a batch made at Fabriano [Italy])’;1 for numerous red-brown Fabriano sheets used for similar subjects, see for example under Tate D32224 (Turner Bequest CCCXVIII 5).
Warrell noted the grey-brown sheets as being torn into two formats: nine sheets of approximately 148 x 232 mm (Tate D32220, D32249–D32250, D32252–D32253, D32255–D32258; Turner Bequest CCCXVIII 1, CCCXIX 1, 2, 4, 5, 7–10), and seven of twice the size, at about 231 x 295 mm (Tate D32223, D32226, D32228–D32229, D32231, D32233, D32242; Turner Bequest CCCXVIII 4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 23).
Verso:
Blank; inscribed by Turner in ink ‘7’ top left. For the artist’s various annotations to his 1840 Venice sheets, see the overall Introduction to the tour.
Matthew Imms
September 2018
How to cite
Matthew Imms, ‘Figures in the Piazzetta, Venice, at Night, with the Basilica and Campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s) 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