Turner, Joseph Mallord William (1775-1851)
Venice from the Giudecca
1840
Oil on canvas, 61 x 91.4 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Object Type
Before photography, oil painting was a primary way of recording views of ancient cities, and many artists were commissioned to produce views of historic places. Oil painting was a favoured and more durable painting medium than watercolour. It was also more expensive and time-consuming than watercolour.
People
We take for granted nowadays that Turner is a great and significant painter, but it was not always so. The critical responses to this and particularly the other pictures, such as The Slave Ship, exhibited by him at the Royal Academy in 1840, were mostly harsh and insulting. Only the support of discerning collectors and connoisseurs of contemporary painting like John Sheepshanks enabled Turner to persist in painting the poetic and modern way he saw the world.
Subjects Depicted
His romantic view of Venice is not strictly accurate in a photographic sense, but gives a vivid, dream-like impression of an ancient city under a beautiful sky. As so often in his works, the sea and the buildings in this painting are depicted with a theatrical grandeur. Many artists before and since Turner‘s time have painted the city, but this is still one of the best known images. (V&A)