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

Finberg later annotated his 1909 Inventory entry (‘The Piazzetta’): ‘S. Mark’s & Ducal Palace. “17” on upper range of arches’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy: ‘from the Molo’.2 He also noted in a copy of Finberg’s 1930 book In Venice with Turner: ‘The Piazzetta from the Molo’.3 The page’s title was amended by Ian Warrell to ‘The Doge’s Palace from the Bacino, with the Columns of the Piazzetta and the Campanile of San Marco’ in 2003, in connection with his concurrent Turner and Venice exhibition at Tate Britain.4

Made with the page turned horizontally, this hastily rendered sketch of one of Venice’s most characteristic views is to the north-north-west, straight up the Piazzetta towards the Piazza San Marco (St Mark’s Square), with the Libreria Sansoviniana receding steeply on the left towards the campanile. The square form in the distance to the right of the first of the two columns in the foreground is the Torre dell’Orologio on the north side of the Piazza; to its right are the domes of the basilica, with the second column lightly rendered to the left of the Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace), most of the south front of which is seen in elevation on the right. The ‘17’ inscribed below the undulating line there likely notes the seventeen open arches at that level of the left-hand half of the façade; the elaborate balcony above is actually centred over the eighteenth.

Compare the central sections of the watercolour study looking in the same direction from further out on the Bacino in the 1819 Como and Venice sketchbook (Tate D15258; Turner Bequest CLXXXI 7), and of the oil painting Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom-House, Venice: Canaletti painting (Tate N00370),5 exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1833 shortly before the present visit. Turner would return to make a more detailed two-part drawing from about the same point in the 1840 Venice and Botzen sketchbook (Tate D31796–D31797; Turner Bequest CCCXIII 3a, 4).

Ian Warrell has suggested6 that folios 4 recto and 30 recto (D31934, D31984) informed aspects of a watercolour likely made soon after the 1833 tour (private collection),7 which was engraved in 1835 as the title-page vignette for volume III of the Life of Napoleon within the ongoing edition of Walter Scott’s Prose Works (Tate impression: T04736). As here, the design shows the view up the Piazzetta from the Molo, centred on the Torre dell’Orologio,8 albeit omitting the palace on the right.

There is a similar view to the present one, from just west of the Piazzetta, on folio 28 verso (D31981); for this sketchbook’s convoluted general sequence, including Hardy George’s broad overview,9 see its Introduction. Folio 9 recto opposite (D31943) is another frontal view from the Bacino a little further east, this time with the right-hand half of the Doge’s Palace on the left.