Free Turner Lecture
April 17 2024
Picture: Paul Mellon Centre
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Paul Mellon Centre and the Turner Society are hosting a free lecture later this month on the subject of The City “Anchored in the Deep Ocean” Dickens, Turner and Venice.
Here's a summary of the talk which will be presented by Professor Malcolm Andrews:
This lecture argues for affinities between Dickens’ prose evocation of Venice and Turner’s oils and watercolours of the city. In 1844, writing from there to a friend, Dickens confided that “I never saw the thing before that I should be afraid to describe. But to tell what Venice is, I feel to be an impossibility”. The same letter also invoked the Venetian paintings of Canaletto, Stanfield and Turner. Accordingly, in composing his Pictures from Italy (1846) Dickens gave a separate chapter to Venice, titled “An Italian Dream”, which shows a radical stylistic rupture from the broadly conventional travel narrative in the rest of the book.
