The Grand Canal: Scene - A Street in Venice

The Grand Canal: Scene — A Street in Venice, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1837, is one of Turner's most spectacular Venetian oils, painted at a moment when his Venetian subjects were becoming increasingly controversial with critics who found his atmospheric dissolution of architectural form irresponsible. The 1837 exhibition was the year in which John Ruskin — then an Oxford student of eighteen — first saw Turner's work in large quantity and was overwhelmed by it, beginning the advocacy that would culminate in Modern Painters (1843). Turner's Venice of the 1830s was a city of the imagination as much as observation: he had visited in 1819, 1833, and 1840, and between visits worked from the accumulated impression of what he had seen rather than from specific topographical notes. The result was a Venice that condensed rather than documented the city's visual essence — the Grand Canal's curve, the palaces dissolving in reflected light, the gondoliers and traders going about their business in a world that seemed to exist at the intersection of water and air.

Turner renders Venice with luminous atmospheric intensity, dissolving architecture and water into a shimmering field of warm color and reflected light that pushed contemporary painting toward abstraction.