Venise, depuis le porche de la Madonna della Salute

Turner saw Venice for the first time in 1819 and jotted it down in a few faint pencil lines. He did not really turn those notes into this picture until after a second visit in 1833, and even then the view is partly invented. Stand where he places you, on the steps of the great domed church of Santa Maria della Salute, and the palaces along the Grand Canal do not actually line up the way he shows them. What he was after was the light. The stone of the buildings seems to dissolve into the water in soft reflections, the trick of a painter who had spent years on watercolours and marine scenes. He exhibited it in London in 1835, where it was much admired.