Turner in Venice: Three Visits, 1819 to 1840, and What They Produced

The three visits

He first reached Venice in September 1819, during his initial Italian journey, and stayed only about five days. He returned in 1833 for roughly a fortnight, and again in 1840 for a slightly longer stay. The total time on the ground was short, and the output from it was disproportionately large.

The pattern is entirely characteristic of him. Turner worked fast on location, filling sketchbooks with pencil notes and rapid colour studies, then spent years afterwards developing finished pictures from that material back in London. Some of the Venetian oils were exhibited more than a decade after the visit that produced the underlying drawings.

Why Venice suited him

The city put together three things he had been painting separately for thirty years: large expanses of water, substantial architecture rising directly out of that water, and a humid atmosphere that softens every edge at any distance. Nowhere else he visited offered the same combination in such a concentrated form.

It also removed a problem. Turner's late handling dissolved solid form, which could look like incompetence when the subject was a building on dry land. In Venice the dissolution is what the place actually looks like on a bright morning, so his manner and his subject stopped working against each other.

The watercolours

The strongest Venetian work is arguably on paper. The 1840 visit produced studies in which the Salute or the Riva is established with a few washes and almost no drawing, sometimes on grey or buff paper that supplies the mid-tone directly, leaving him to add only the extremes of light and dark.

These were private. Turner did not exhibit watercolours of this kind and many were never shown in his lifetime, which is why they reached the public through the Bequest and not the market. They are now among the most admired parts of his output and were largely unknown to his own audience.

The exhibited oils

He showed Venetian oils at the Royal Academy repeatedly through the 1830s and 1840s, and they sold well. The subject was already popular with collectors, the pictures were bright, and they attracted much less of the hostility his storm paintings provoked. For a commercially minded painter this was a reliable seam.

Critics occasionally noticed the contradiction in their own position. A city rendered as shimmering light, with its architecture barely holding together, was praised in a Venetian scene by the very writers who complained about identical handling elsewhere. The subject was doing a great deal of work in making the technique acceptable.

What he left out

Turner's Venice contains remarkably little of the city as a place people live in. Markets, interiors, trades and ordinary streets barely appear, and the gondolas are compositional marks instead of working boats. He painted the lagoon frontage almost exclusively, which is the view a visitor gets and a resident rarely does.

Where to see it

The great majority of the Venetian drawings and watercolours are held in the Turner Bequest at Tate in London. The finished oils are far more widely dispersed, with important examples in the National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and a number of other collections in Britain and the United States.