Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom-House, Venice: Turner, 1833

The view

The picture takes the standard tourist prospect from the water: the Doge's Palace along the left, the Bridge of Sighs behind it, the Dogana closing the composition on the right, and the mouth of the Grand Canal opening in between. Gondolas and larger craft fill the foreground, and the light comes flat off the lagoon.

Catalogue record — Tate collection dataset (CC0)

Artist	Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)
Date	1833
Exhibited	Royal Academy, 1833
Medium	Oil paint on mahogany
Dimensions	support: 511 x 816 mm
Collection	Tate, London
Accession number	N00370
Credit line	Presented by Robert Vernon 1847

What separates it from the eighteenth-century view painters is the handling of that light. The architecture is described accurately enough to be identified building by building, but the stone is not solid: it is pale, chalky and slightly dissolved at every edge, as though the humidity of the lagoon has got into the paint.

The Canaletti joke

Turner's full exhibition title ended with the words Canaletti painting, and a small figure of the painter at work appears in the left foreground. Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto, had died in 1768 and was by then the definitive painter of Venice for British collectors, most of whom had bought him on the Grand Tour.

Including him was both homage and challenge at once, and the choice of an eighteenth-century rival follows exactly the same pattern as Turner's lifelong argument with Claude Lorrain. He tended to declare his competition and not conceal it, and the declaration usually appeared in the catalogue entry where buyers would be sure to read it.

Painted on mahogany

The support is a mahogany panel instead of canvas, which is unusual for an exhibited Turner of this date and gives the surface a particular smoothness. The rigid ground let him work thin, wet paint without the weave breaking it up, and the result holds detail in the architecture that a canvas would have coarsened.

Why Venice arrived so late

Turner first saw Venice in 1819 and returned in 1833, but exhibited nothing from the city for fourteen years. Whether he was waiting for his handling to catch up with the subject or simply for the market to want Venetian pictures is not documented, and both explanations have been argued for at length.

What is clear is that once he started he did not stop. Venetian oils appeared at the Royal Academy repeatedly through the following decade and sold consistently well, and the subject turned out to suit his late manner better than anything else he painted. This panel is where that long sequence begins.

The gondolas

One detail separates Turner's Venice from the view painters he was competing with. His gondolas are marks instead of vessels: a dark stroke for the hull, a hook for the ferro, and no attempt at the rigging or the passengers a tourist print would itemise. They establish scale and nothing else.

Where to see it

The painting is at Tate in London, part of the Turner Bequest, so he kept it himself instead of selling it. Several of the later Venetian oils are more widely dispersed, which makes Tate the best place to see the beginning and the middle of the sequence in one visit and not two.