The Grand Canal, Venice by J.M.W. Turner
Submitted by Dave Hattorimanabe

              In The Grand Canal, Venice (ca. 1830), an oil painting in the collection of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, Joseph Mallord William Turner uses a specific hue to set a focal point and then repeats that color in various saturations and shades throughout his entire cityscape to create a portrait of the sun as a vast and awe-inducing force.

              Color, in this case yellow, is the predominant element in Turner's painting and it appears in almost every inch of the canvas. Most notably, the yellow occupies the upper two-thirds of the canvas, a zone normally used to portray the sky in landscapes and cityscapes. Here in this upper section we see an asymmetrical yellow mass much like a huge blazing yellow cloud and it seems to fill the entire sky.

              Turner includes lighter values of yellow in certain sections of this mass to create the effect of light that is so bright as to negate color. He uses a similar whitish value in a small disk in the mass to show us the source of this tremendous sunlight. As a variant of yellow, he paints it with a touch of orange-brown and uses this as indistinct horizontal lines and streaks and these suggest the presence of clouds and haze. The yellow even seeks to invade the remote corners of the sky where Turner was still able to use blue.

              The use of yellow continues in the buildings and the canal that constitute the cityscape; it is used in the depiction of the water and the gondolas and people as well, as much for those in the middle of the water as those grouped at the edges of the canal. This renders the exact colors of the boats and the clothes as less intense and instead they become, in many cases, indistinct and impure tints and shades of yellow--or else a dark (yellowish-) brown in the onslaught of light. We are unable to distinguish the number of passengers or how many boats there are in any blur of color. Also indistinct are the lines of the buildings along both sides of the canal and although we are able to discern doors and windows and arches, we have to guess at the textures of materials of the faces of the buildings, whose colors are also washed over with yellow light. This use of subjective color by Turner serves to show us that sunlight is everywhere, that it is inevitable and transforms everything that we see, in Venice and much farther beyond Venice. As the familiar becomes unrecognizable in sunlight, the viewer is invited to study the scene to re-interpret the visual and physical reality of the city, and by extension, the world.

              Turner underscores his view by incorporating lines that are blurry and indistinct for his depiction of Venice. The tentative and fuzzy horizontal lines in the canal water convey the idea of waves and they reinforce the horizontal streaks suggested in the yellow mass of light in the sky. This horizontality underlines the inevitability of the ever-spreading yellow light as it engulfs the entire scenario and threatens to wash over the viewer as it as it continues outward; the ill-defined lines strongly hint that it is not the objects of Venice that are the true subject.

              The vanishing point that Turner establishes in this work sits almost directly below the whitish-yellow disk and he seems to suggest, in reinforcing the sun as the focal point in this way, the attribution of a fundamental, primordial status. The viewer begins to understand that this is not so much a landscape of a famous Italian locale as painted by so many artists as it is a portrait of nature (and man's frailty) more akin to Turner's famous Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps.

              One writer has referred to Turner's portrayal of the sun as "a celebration of light" (Warrell, 204); undoubtedly an understatement when we realize the scope of Turner's awe and reverence for a Nature so unspeakably immense and inexorable. In giving us an unconventional view of Venice, Turner subverts the established definition of landscape painting and chooses instead to focus on his emotions upon confronting the Mediterranean sun. In doing so, he foreshadows the ideas of the Impressionists who were to follow.

REFERENCES

Warrell, Ian. "Into the light." J. M. W. Turner [exhibition catalog], edited by Ian Warrell. Tate Publishing, London. 2007.