JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, R.A. (LONDON 1775-1851)
JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, R.A. (LONDON 1775-1851)
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JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, R.A. (LONDON 1775-1851)

The approach to Venice or Venice from the lagoon, circa 1840

Details
JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, R.A. (LONDON 1775-1851)
The approach to Venice or Venice from the lagoon, circa 1840
watercolor, pen and red and brown ink
8 11⁄16 x 12 ½ in. (22.1 x 31.8 cm)
Provenance
Thomas Griffith (1795-1868), London; by descent to his daughter
Jemima Lardner Griffith; Christie’s, London, 4 July 1887, lot 193, ‘Approach to Venice’ (155 gns to Agnew's).
with Agnew’s, London, as ‘Approach to Venice’; where purchased by
Thomas Stuart Kennedy (1841-1894), Park Hill, Wetherby, Yorkshire, 6 July 1887.
Rev. T.F. Griffith.
Anonymous sale [Rev T.F. Griffith]; Christie’s, London, 26 March 1920, lot 48, as ‘The Approach to Venice’, (165 gns to Croal Thomson).
with David Croal Thomson (1855-1930), London.
Haddon C. Adams (1898-1971), London; by descent in the family to the present owner.
Sale Room Notice
We are grateful to Ian Warrell for further work on the provenance of Turner’s Venetian watercolours. Please also note online the updated provenance and literature for this lot, not included in the printed catalogue:

Thomas Griffith (1795-1868), London and by descent to his daughter
Jemima Lardner Griffith.
Possibly her sale; Christie’s, London, 4 July 1887, lot 193, ‘Approach to Venice’ (155 gns to Agnew’s).
with Agnew’s, London as ‘Approach to Venice’, where purchased by
Thomas Stuart Kennedy (?1841-1894), Park Hill, Wetherby, Yorkshire, 6 July 1887 and then to his wife Clara.
Haddon C Adams (1898-1971), London and by descent in the family to the present owner.

Brought to you by

Giada Damen, Ph.D.
Giada Damen, Ph.D. Specialist

Lot Essay

Since they first came to light, the watercolors Turner made in 1840, on his third and final visit to Venice, have always been recognized as an extraordinary high point in the work of an artist then entering the final phase of a long life of ingenious creativity. The majority of these watercolors remained in Turner’s own possession, as private meditations on the watery city, in which the weighty solidity of Venice’s architectural fabric melts away and is transformed by the unique character of the reflective light on the Lagoon. After his death, these seemingly impressionistic color studies joined the national collection as part of the Turner Bequest (now mostly at Tate Britain). However the pages of at least one ‘roll’ sketchbook, as well as individual loose sheets that had been used on the same visit, were among the works that Thomas Griffith (1795-1868), Turner’s dealer, was able to offer collectors from the early 1860s.

In 1930 A.J. Finberg, a scholar and one of Turner’s biographers, drew up a list of the non-Tate watercolors depicting Venice, amounting to perhaps thirty works (In Venice with Turner, 1930, pp.159-162). Even at that stage the majority of these had passed from notable private collections of the artist’s works to the principal museums across Great Britain. Ruskin had bequeathed those he acquired in 1861 to the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge, presenting three watercolors to each institution. When the Whitworth Art Institute was established in Manchester in 1892, its founding collection came largely from J.E. Taylor, founder of the Guardian newspaper, who had sought watercolors from all aspects of Turner’s career, including a view of the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Then in 1900 Henry Vaughan had divided his celebrated collection of Turner watercolors between the national galleries of Ireland and Scotland, leaving three to Dublin and a spectacular group of six to Edinburgh. Subsequently individual items went to the British Museum in 1915 and 1958, to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in 1934, and more recently the Whitworth benefited from another gift in 2018.

Beyond Britain and Ireland, the Yale Center for British Art is currently the only international museum to possess one of the Venetian watercolors. Its view of the Grand Canal, with the Dogana and San Giorgio in the distance, had been bought by Paul Mellon in 1966, the same year that he acquired another notable Turner work: Dort, or Dordrecht, the Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam becalmed (1818, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven).

As a result of this steady institutionalization there are now only a handful of Turner’s views of Venice remaining in private hands.

The present watercolor was for many years mis-attributed as the work of John Ruskin (1819-1900) when owned by Haddon C. Adams, who donated many items by the celebrated art critic and amateur artist to the Whitehouse Education Trust when it was at Bembridge; the collection is now housed at the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University. Presumably the presiding enthusiasm for Ruskin obscured the origins and correct identity of some items in the collection, including this Venetian scene, for later members of the family.

Prior to Adams it was owned by David Croal Thomson (1855-1930), a noted Scottish figure in the art world at the end of the nineteenth century, who edited the Art Journal, and was a dealer with the Goupil Gallery and Agnew’s, before running Barbizon House between 1918 and 1924. It was during the latter period that he acquired this watercolor. A decade later, in 1930, it was still catalogued as a Turner by A.J. Finberg, though its whereabouts was no longer known. Since its exciting recent reappearance, Peter Bower has been able to confirm that the paper used is the same type as that adopted for many of the views of Venice in the Turner Bequest.


Painting in Venice in 1840

Turner’s relatively lengthy stay of about two weeks in Venice in 1840 provided the opportunity to slacken his usual hurtling pace. Lodging at the mouth of the Grand Canal in the Ca’ Giustinian, in which the Hotel Europa then operated, he was ideally placed to enjoy the spectacular view across the Bacino di San Marco, where gondolas and other varieties of Venetian watercraft jostled among the larger vessels visiting from other ports.

As usual Turner recorded his first-hand observations on the spot in small notebooks, using only graphite. But in Venice that year he appears to have made time to work from his motifs directly in watercolor, sometimes with very little indication of underlying pencil outlines. These studies were painted in a pair of soft-bound sketchbooks, and on various different types of paper that had been cut to his preferred size of around 20 x 28 cm. Much of the paper was made by Charles Ansell and apparently used primarily during the 1840 visit (see Ian Warrell and Peter Bower, in Turner’s Venice, London 2003, pp. 258-9).

Technically, Turner began his designs by setting down broadly painted washes of the dominant colors, as is very clear in this work. Here he deployed a variety of nuanced shades of the blue-jade marine tone that pervades his Venetian watercolors, using them to demarcate the undulating waves dragged across the foreground and the lower rank of ribbed cirrus clouds. Mixed in with this feature he applied some red color, which is brighter and purer towards the top of the sheet. Running through the middle of the image is a lighter, reserved area of paper, in which he has made red notations, probably with a pen or the end of his brush, indicating the topography of the city. This was a method he repeatedly used in Venice, most notably in the series of views passing along the Riva degli Schiavoni (see fig.1; and Turner’s Venice, 2003, pp. 219-231) or for his depictions of San Giorgio Maggiore (fig. 2; see also Turner’s Venice, 2003, p.199 for D32158). He concentrated most particularly on notable landmarks, such as churches and their bell towers, to provide the sense of specific locations.

Another sheet from the same batch as the present work is the airy evocation of twilight, The New Moon: the Dogana from the steps of the Hotel Europa (fig.3; Christie’s, London, 10 July 2014, lot 209), which is also given earth-bound weight by the salty-toned waters of its foreground.

Given this concentration of existing views focused on the waterfront surrounding the Bacino di San Marco and the main channel towards the sea, it might be reasonable to conclude that that area is also the subject of this watercolor. There is here, for example, a prominent bell tower, towards the middle of the image, which might be assumed to be the great Campanile next to the Doge’s Palace. However the buildings immediately adjacent to it in the design are not articulated in a way that suggest the bulk of the distinctive palace or the neighboring Zecca. Furthermore, there is no indication of the Grand Canal, flanked by the Dogana or the domes of the Salute, to the left.

After the Campanile, the next tallest bell-towers in Venice are those of the Frari and San Francesco della Vigna, both rising to 69 meters (224 feet). The second of these lies close to the northern quays of the main island, just to the west of the Arsenale, and possesses roughly the same architectural components at the top of its tower as the principal Campanile. If San Francesco della Vigna is accepted as the main vertical structure in the watercolor, another notable building, a short way to the right, seems likely to be the church of San Lorenzo, its façade punctuated by one of its large Diocletian, or thermal windows.


Wider Horizons

During his visit in 1840 Turner’s sketches on the lagoon between San Francesco della Vigna and the island cemetery of San Michele resulted in one of his most haunting oil paintings: the stunning view over the unbroken and reflective waters titled Campo Santo, Venice (1842, Toledo Museum of Art; see Turner’s Venice, 2003, p. 237). As well as drawing on pencil sketches of individual buildings, he painted a series of bold watercolor studies in which the specifics of Venetian topography are kept to a minimum, barely lining the horizon or utterly subdued by his greater fascination for color and atmospheric effects (see Turner’s Venice, pp. 238-9). One of these, fig. 4, utilizes a similar palette to this watercolor, but like the rest of the sequence is characterized by the untroubled serenity of the still Lagoon waters. In the years after his 1840 tour Turner was increasingly inclined to make oil paintings that evoke the process of arriving at, or departing from Venice, the sensations of moving across the wide expanse of water perhaps best distilled in the National Gallery of Art’s picture Approach to Venice (1844, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.),

In reality, Turner’s time in Venice was evidently disturbed by storms arising from the sultry, late-summer heat. One of the most dramatic watercolors in the National Galleries of Scotland, depicts figures rushing to escape bolts of lightning in the Piazzetta, while other images painted in 1840 recreate the drama of rain clouds pressing down on the Bacino (fig. 5). Turner prided himself on the veracity of his depictions of extreme weather effects, famously claiming on one occasion to have been tied to a mast in order that he could witness a snowstorm. Whether he actually sketched in such circumstances seems unlikely, especially as, once his memory was furnished by experiences, he was able to summon up complex subjects or effects with or without visual aides.

In this watercolor, the movement of the tide and the thickening clouds suggest the arrival of a new weather front. The fiery edges to the upper clouds indicate a time towards early evening, perhaps just after sunset, when the departure of the sun suddenly drains color from parts of the sky.

Legacy

Turner was not alone in his pursuit of coastal or marine scenes that surveyed open water, or which appear to stretch towards the infinite. His great German contemporary Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) similarly exploited the limitless meanings inherent in a prospect over the sea as one of his most important subjects (fig. 6), as has the contemporary Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. In Turner’s case, his contemplation of the sea brought him to reflect on mankind’s place in the vastness of nature, sometimes inducing him to resort to poetic expression of his thoughts in his ongoing epic the Fallacies of Hope.

In fact, the sea constituted the main subject of Turner’s life, and at each stage he produced sets of new variations on that theme, much as Monet explored his understanding of light and color through his numerous different series (fig. 7).

We are grateful to Ian Warrell for this catalogue entry and Peter Bower for examining the watercolor.

Fig. 1, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), Venice from the Canale di San Marco, with the Campanile and Domes of San Marco (St Mark’s) in the Distance, watercolour, 1840, TB CCCXVI 18, © Tate.
Fig. 2, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, at Sunset, from along the Riva degli Schiavoni, watercolour, 1840, TB CCCXVI 24, © Tate.
Fig. 3, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), Venice: The New Moon – The Dogana from the steps of The Hotel Europa, watercolour, c.1840, Private Collection, © Christie’s Images.
Fig. 4, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), The Lagoon near Venice: ?Early Morning, watercolour, 1840, TB CCCLXIV 332, © Tate.
Fig. 5, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), Storm at Sunset, Venice, pen and red ink and watercolour, c.1840, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, © Bridgeman Images.
Fig. 6, Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), The Monk by the Sea, oil on canvas, 1808-10, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, © Bridgeman Images.
Fig. 7, Claude Monet (1840-1926), Waterloo Bridge at Dusk, oil on canvas, 1904, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, © Bridgeman Images.

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