Later this yr, work shall be full on the digital cataloguing of the Turner Bequest, the trove of 37,000-plus works by J.M.W. Turner left to the nation on his dying in 1851, which finally discovered their method to the Tate Gallery, now Tate Britain. Most of it’s already on-line. The 250th anniversary of Turner’s delivery this yr prompted me to vanish once more down this most fulfilling rabbit gap. And significantly Turner’s elegant Venice watercolours.
Countless surprise—Turner’s and our personal—is in these little work. Take San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, at Sundown, from alongside the Riva degli Schiavoni (1840). It photos Venice at its most inchoate, with the Bacino di San Marco a milky blur, a solitary gondola amid inexperienced and violet waves, and the island of San Giorgio a pale purple mirage above, “gleaming uncertainly”, as A.J. Finberg—the bequest’s pre-digital cataloguer—wrote of one other watercolour. Though he initially misidentified the motif, the critic John Ruskin described this San Giorgio as “a full flushed second twilight”, a time period he used for a “faint reflection” of the sundown. “Exquisitely lovely for tender color and ambiance.”
Among the many numerous artists to have responded to Venice, Turner is unmatched in understanding these distinctive hues and atmosphere. In fact, the town was a pure topic for somebody so acutely attuned to gentle and its results; how may Turner miss this open aim?
Perplexingly unfulfilling
But it surely’s not that straightforward. One may say the identical of Monet, whose work of Venice are the topic of a significant present on the Brooklyn Museum opening in October. I hope that exhibition would possibly change my thoughts, however I’ve at all times discovered his Venice perplexingly unfulfilling: a sundown too lurid and unsubtle, buildings too squat, heavy and wobbly, the subtleties of its water seemingly past his formulaic brushwork. Though Monet finally threw himself into portray the town, it appears notable that he initially described it as “too lovely to be painted” and “ungraspable” and urged that “nobody has given the concept of Venice”.
Turner made gentle of the ungraspability. However he additionally recognised that Venice, for all its magnificence, has an innate melancholy, a temper I discover curiously absent in Monet. Maybe, regardless of their shared obsession with the consequences of sunshine, this can be a elementary distinction between a Romantic painter and an Impressionist dealing with the identical views: that in one of the best depictions of the town, it’s as a lot felt as seen. It is for that reason that I prize Francesco Guardi’s views of the town over Canaletto’s. Nonetheless a lot Canaletto pleases the attention, Guardi hits the intestine, too. In Guardi, I can think about the filth and squalor that 18th-century guests encountered in Venice, in addition to its otherworldly splendour.
Modernist rejection
In fact, by way of the twentieth century, it turned more durable for artists to color Venice—not simply due to diminishing capability for unique reflections, but in addition as a result of it’s so squarely sealed in its historic id. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist assertion—“We repudiate the previous Venice … We need to treatment and heal this putrefying metropolis, this magnificent sore from the previous”—was typical of the iconoclastic spirit of the Modernist avant-garde. And but, within the century’s closing a long time, an incredible physique of labor responding to the town was painted. Howard Hodgkin’s Venice, although described in thick oil slightly than watercolour, is paying homage to Turner’s. It’s as elegiac as it’s lovely.
I just lately noticed Hodgkin’s View from Venice (1984-85) within the late painter’s London studio. It displays the view—however nearly totally represents the artist’s feeling—after shutters have been opened from a resort room, searching to a view throughout the Bacino to San Giorgio, not removed from the place Turner painted his view. Right here, once more, Venice gleams uncertainly in artwork, and conveys its timeless poetry.
