Grand Canal, Venice

Grand Canal, Venice, painted around 1850 and now in the Walters Art Museum, is among the last paintings Turner made before his death in December 1851 — one of the final products of an artistic career that had begun in the 1780s and sustained an unbroken trajectory of development for over sixty years. By 1850 Venice had become for Turner essentially a luminous myth: the three visits of 1819, 1833, and 1840 had provided the raw material, but the later Venetian paintings like this one were constructed entirely from accumulated visual memory and the imagination of an artist who had spent his entire life thinking about the relationship between light and water. The Grand Canal, with its procession of palaces and its reflection-filled surface, remained his most purely distilled Venetian subject to the end — architecture dissolving into light dissolving into water dissolving back into light. Whistler, who visited Venice in 1879-80, was well aware of Turner's late Venetian legacy.

Turner dissolves the Grand Canal into a shimmering field of warm color and light, with architectural forms barely suggested through the overwhelming luminous atmosphere.