O Dogano, San Giorgio, Citella, das escadarias do Europa

Turner showed this at the Royal Academy in 1842, near the end of his life, when his Venice pictures were dissolving into little more than light on water. The city he painted was no longer an independent republic. Venice had fallen to Napoleon decades earlier and by the 1840s belonged to the Austrian Empire, a faded tourist town living off its own past. Turner stayed at the Hotel Europa on the Grand Canal, and this is roughly the view from its steps, with the customs house and the domed church of Santa Maria della Salute pale against the sky. The collector Robert Vernon bought it that same year, and within five years it had been given to the nation.