His palette is also limited to earth colours, with grey-blue on the water below. Superimposed on that waterfront are passing boats, their sails and rigging complicating the buildings behind. The lower half of his paper (in the ‘portrait’ orientation) contains only reflections the upper half is a view from the water placing the Campanile slightly to the right of centre, little higher than neighbouring church domes. His watercolour Venice (1881) was clearly painted quickly en plein air, and shows a view not dissimilar in nature to Turner’s Venice from the Giudecca. The American Impressionist John Henry Twachtman was one of several great American landscape painters who visited Venice, but the only one for whom I have been able to locate a suitable view. John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902), Venice (1881), watercolour, 33.3 x 27.9 cm, Private collection. All these effects contribute to the overall impression of spontaneity and speed of execution. This would have required multiple sessions in front of the motif, or more probably several days spent in a studio.Ĭolours are bright, and broad areas such as the sky and water made up from strokes of unmixed colours, to give them a coarse chromatic texture which is typical of Renoir’s style at the time. This left him with substantial bands of largely blue sky and vacant water, above and below the buildings and boats.Īlthough this painting makes visible abundant brushstrokes and appears very loose in its facture, Renoir has included a lot of fine detail, such as the individual arches and columns for the whole of the front of the Doge’s Palace, even some of the tracery in the windows above. Renoir’s canvas has an aspect ratio of 1.24:1, considerably more square than the golden ratio, and far from the panoramic proportions that might be expected for such a shallow view. The tops of the roofs follow the horizontal centreline, with the Campanile reaching well above that, and various boats below the band of buildings. The first of several Impressionists to visit Venice, Pierre-Auguste Renoir chose a view of the Piazzetta from over the water, further back than Turner’s, in his Doge’s Palace, Venice from 1881. Paintings 1881-1908 Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Doge’s Palace, Venice (1881), oil on canvas, 54.5 x 65 cm, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. Photograph of Piazza San Marco, Venezia (2006). Outline plan of Piazza San Marco, Venezia, as in 1831, after Quadri-Moretti (via Wikimedia Commons). To remind you of its geography, here’s the plan and a more recent photograph. Today we’re back in Piazza San Marco in Venice, to see it in paintings from high Impressionism in 1881 to those of the years before the First World War.
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