Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore
J. M. W. Turner·1834
Historical Context
Turner's Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore (1834) at the National Gallery of Art is one of his most celebrated Venice subjects, depicting the customs house at the entrance to the Grand Canal with Palladio's island church behind. The view, taken from the mouth of the Grand Canal, gave Turner the combination of architectural grandeur, water, sky, and the city's characteristic atmosphere of reflected and refracted light. By 1834 his Venice subjects had established a new language for depicting the city — not the documentary precision of Canaletto but a transformation of Venice into pure luminous experience. His use of warm pinks and yellows against the deep blue water created the color relationships that Ruskin would analyze as the culmination of European landscape tradition.
Technical Analysis
The buildings are rendered with sufficient detail to be recognizable while dissolving into the surrounding atmosphere of golden light. Turner's handling of water reflections creates a shimmering surface that unifies land, water, and sky.
Look Closer
- ◆Notice the Dogana's triangular form at the entrance to the Grand Canal: Turner identifies this customs house by its specific silhouette, giving the atmospheric painting topographic grounding.
- ◆Look at Palladio's San Giorgio Maggiore across the water: the domed church on its island provides the painting's right-hand anchor, its white stone dissolving in the warm light.
- ◆Observe the gondolas and shipping in the foreground: their dark hulls create strong tonal accents that anchor the atmospheric landscape in specific material reality.
- ◆Find Turner's characteristic interplay between warm and cool tones: the golden sunlight and cool blue water create the color relationship that Ruskin analyzed as the culmination of European landscape tradition.
Provenance
Painted for Henry McConnel [1801-1871], The Polygon, Ardwick, Manchester; sold 1849 to John Naylor, Leighton Hall, Liverpool;[1] passed to his wife; purchased 1910 through (Dyer and Sons) by (Thos. Agnew & Sons, Ltd., London); re-entered April 1910 in Agnew's stock in joint ownership with (Arthur J. Sulley & Co., London); purchased 13 June 1910 from (Arthur J. Sulley & Co., London) by Peter A.B. Widener, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; inheritance from estate of Peter A.B. Widener by gift through power of appointment of Joseph E. Widener, Elkins Park. [1] McConnel, acclaimed as "the pioneer of art collecting in Lancashire," subsequently commissioned a contrasting companion picture of an industrial scene at a seaport in the north of England (NGA 1942.9.86, _Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight_). In 1861 he tried, unsuccessfully, to buy back from John Naylor one or other of these canvasses, which he had sold to him in 1849. McConnel to John Naylor, 28 May 1861 (quoted in Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, _The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner_, 2 vols., rev. ed., New Haven: 1984: I:205).
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