1840
From the Grand Canal and Giudecca sketchbook
Watercolour on paper

Turner painted this work during his third and final visit to Venice, in the late summer of 1840.  It is one of a number of beautiful colour studies made in two of the soft-covered sketchbooks he frequently used on his later travels.  It is also one of a group of watercolours depicting the wide Giudecca canal, which separates the main part of the city, to the left, from the islands of Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore to its south. This area of Venice had been previously neglected by Turner, but his new fascination with the waters of the Giudecca offered him original ways of presenting the city.  Turner’s viewpoint at the western end of the canal is near the deconsecrated church, and convent, of Santi Biagio e Cataldo which, together with other religious institutions on the Giudecca, had been suppressed following Venice’s fall to Napoleon in 1797.  Today the site is dominated by the vast Molino Stucky Hilton hotel.  

In many of his 1840 Venetian studies Turner’s interest, for the most part, is in light, mist and reflections on water.  In this atmospheric study he depicts the shell of the church bathed in the pink light of the setting sun and exquisitely contrasted with the green of the Lagoon.  He uses a soft, translucent yellow for the sky and to replicate the departing light, and veils the distant, faintly depicted architecture in a misty opalescence.  With thin washes, he bleeds the watercolours into each other, using more intense colour to depict the foreground scene of fishermen casting their nets in the shallow water.