The pessimism that lies behind Turner's views of Venice is here made apparent by the verses from the Fallacies of Hope published in the Royal Academy catalogue:

Fair shines the morn, and soft the zephyrs blow,

Venezia's fisher spreads his painted sail so gay,

Nor heeds the demon that in grim repose

Expects his evening prey.

Based in part on Thomas Gray's 'The Bard' these lines appear slightly differently in different copies of the catalogue, as Ruskin explained in a footnote to his notes on the Turners shown at Marlborough House in 1856: 'Turner seems to have revised his own additions to Gray, in the catalogues, as he did his pictures on the walls, with much discomfiture to the printer and the public. He wanted afterwards to make the first lines of this legend rhyme with each other; and to read:

Fair shines the moon, the Zephyr blows a gale

Venetia's fisher spreads his painted sail.

The two readings got confused, and, if I remember right, some of the catalogues read "soft the Zephyr blows a gale" and "spreads his painted sail so gay" - to the great admiration of the collectors of the Sibylline leaves of the "Fallacies of Hope" ' John Gage suggests that Turner was also influenced, both in his verbal imagery and in the underlying pessimism, by the section on Venice in Shelley's 'Lines written among the Euganean Hills'; this section was included in S. C. Hall's anthology The Book of Gems, 1838, a copy of which Turner owned.

The picture was one of Ruskin's favourites. In his diary he wrote, under 29 April 1844, 'Yesterday, when I called with my father on Turner, he was kinder than I ever remember. He shook hands most cordially with my father, wanted us to have a glass of wine, asked us to go upstairs into the gallery. When there, I went immediately in search of the "Sol di Venezia", saying it was my favourite. "I thought", said Turner, "it was the 'St. Benedetto'" [No.535]. It was flattering that he remembered that I had told him this. I said the worst of his pictures was one could never see enough of them. "That's part of their quality," said Turner.' A year later, as Ruskin wrote in a letter to his father of 14 September 1845, he was delighted to see 'a fishing boat with its painted sail full to the wind, the most gorgeous orange and red, in everything, form, colour & feeling, the very counterpart of the Sol di Venezia'.

The critics of the 1843 Academy exhibition were less enthusiastic, being rather put off by the verses that give the picture its hidden note of doom. 'His style of dealing with quotations' , wrote the Athenaeum for 17 June, is as unscrupulous as his style of treating nature and her attributes of form and colour'. ', while the Art Union for June 1843 suggested that Turner's 'wretched verses may have had some deliterious influence on the painter's mind - may have cast a spell over a great genius. Oh! that he would go back to nature!' The critic went on, 'The most celebrated painters have been said to be "before their time", but the world has always, at some time, or other, come up with them. The author of the "Sun of Venice" is far out of sight; he leaves the world to turn round without him: at least in those of his works, of the light of which we have no glimmering, he cannot hope to be even overtaken by distant posterity; such extravagances all sensible people must condemn; nor

is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this "Sun of Venice"'.