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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
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Joseph Mallord William Turner The Islands of San Michele and San Cristoforo della Pace in the Lagoon North of Venice, with Distant Mountains 1833

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Islands of San Michele and San Cristoforo della Pace in the Lagoon North of Venice, with Distant Mountains’ 1833
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 16 Verso:
The Islands of San Michele and San Cristoforo della Pace in the Lagoon North of Venice, with Distant Mountains 1833
D31957
Turner Bequest CCCXIV 16a
Pencil on white laid paper, 109 x 203 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Finberg later annotated his 1909 Inventory entry (‘Distant buildings’): ‘? Campo Santo – with distant mntns’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy: ‘Distant Alps & Island of S. Michele from Fondementa Nuove’.2 He also noted in a copy of Finberg’s 1930 book In Venice with Turner: ‘from the Fundamente Nuove’.3 The page’s title was amended by Ian Warrell to ‘Two Islands in the Lagoon’ in 2003, in connection with his concurrent Turner and Venice exhibition at Tate Britain.4 Both elements, one above the other, were drawn with the page turned horizontally.
Warrell subsequently identified the viewpoint as the vicinity of the island church of San Pietro di Castello, at the eastern end of Venice, seen on folio 17 recto opposite (D31958), looking across the northern Lagoon to the mountains of the mainland. He has noted the upper subject as the Isola di San Michele with its cemetery (‘campo santo’ in Italian), and the lower as likely the neighbouring island of San Cristoforo della Pace, subsequently incorporated into the first; see also folio 41 verso (D32006).5 As the wording of Finberg’s note likely suggests, the subject informed the oil painting Campo Santo, Venice, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1842 (Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio),6 where the little pyramid in the upper view here is picked out in gleaming white.
These sketches fall within what was perhaps a single waterborne excursion (folios 10 verso–24 recto; D31945–D31972) out past the Giardini Pubblici and San Pietro and then back westwards across the Lagoon along the southern shores of the islands of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Giudecca, before returning to the Bacino at the heart of the city along the Canale della Giudecca. For this sketchbook’s somewhat convoluted general sequence, see its Introduction.

Matthew Imms
May 2019

1
Undated MS note by Finberg (died 1939) in interleaved copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, opposite p.1013.
2
Undated MS note by Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, II, p.1013.
3
Undated MS note by Bell in copy of Finberg 1930, Study Room, British Museum, London, p.169, as transcribed by Ian Warrell (Tate cataloguing files, as ‘before 1936’).
4
Noted October 2003 in Tate registrars’ files.
5
Draft notes of 2010–11, Tate cataloguing files.
6
Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, p.246 no.397, pl.401 (colour).

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Islands of San Michele and San Cristoforo della Pace in the Lagoon North of Venice, with Distant Mountains 1833 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2019, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, March 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-islands-of-san-michele-and-san-cristoforo-della-pace-in-r1203635, accessed 22 July 2024.