Going to the Ball (San Martino)

Turner showed this at the Royal Academy in 1846, when he was 71 and had not set foot in Venice for six years. He built the scene from memory and old sketchbooks: gondolas near the church of San Martino, by the gates of the Arsenale, figures setting out for a masked ball as the evening light comes apart into haze. Venice by then was a tired city under Austrian rule, its carnival grandeur long behind it. To this glittering evening Turner pinned a few lines from his own long, gloomy manuscript poem, the Fallacies of Hope, and reviewers mocked him for the verses. He painted a companion piece the same year showing the return from the ball. The two were among the last views of Venice he ever made.