View of Venice: The Ducal Palace, Dogana and Part of San Giorgio

In August 1840 Turner made what turned out to be his last visit to Venice. The following spring he sent three Venetian pictures to the Royal Academy in London, and this was one of them. It was painted for a friend, the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, a fellow Academician, who died that November, and the canvas passed by inheritance to another owner and then through several English collections. The view looks along the mouth of the Giudecca Canal, with the Doge's Palace and the Campanile of San Marco in the middle distance and the dome of San Giorgio Maggiore on the right. Reviewers in 1841 praised Turner's Venetian pictures for “the clearness of air and water”. The dealer Joseph Duveen sold it to an American collector in 1925, and it was not shown publicly in Britain again until Tate's Turner and Venice exhibition in 2003.