Approach to Venice

Approach to Venice shows the city rising from the lagoon as a traveler nears it by water, one of a sequence of Venetian views Joseph Mallord William Turner painted throughout his career. When the canvas was first shown in 1844 he quoted Byron in the exhibition catalogue, the Romantic poet’s lines on the moonlit city, a gesture typical of the way Turner joined Venetian light to literature. Painted after his journey through Italy of 1840, the picture belongs to the culminating, near-abstract phase of his art in which architecture dissolves into radiance and the boundary between sea and sky grows uncertain.