J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

Without further comment, Finberg labelled this ‘colour beginning’ as ‘On the Lake of Lucerne (?)’ within a section of his 1909 Inventory generically dated to about 1820–30.1 As Gerald Wilkinson has summarised, Turner’s large watercolour Lake Lucerne, from the Landing Place at Fluelen, Looking towards Bauen and Tell’s Chapel, Switzerland, based on 1802 sketches, was exhibited in 1815 (private collection):2 ‘Finberg would be familiar with that drawing. The colour of this sketch, however, is not of 1815. Turner next visited Lucerne in 1841.’ When exhibited at Tate Britain in 2009, the present work was labelled ‘A Promontory on a Lake’, and dated to about 1840,3 preceding Turner’s late annual Swiss visits of 1841–4.

Eric Shanes has proposed a ‘visually tenuous’ link4 with the mythological painting Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus – Homer’s Odyssey, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1829 (Turner Bequest, National Gallery, London).5 Turner had been considering the subject since making a wash study in the Wey, Guildford sketchbook of 1805 (Tate D06186; Turner Bequest XCVIII 5), and painted a muted oil sketch a year or two before the exhibited composition (Tate N02958).6 The similarities between the richly coloured final version and this sheet lie in the massing of reddish brown rocks on the left and dark central forms across water against a bright dawn sky, although given the generalised nature of the forms here, this may be fortuitous.

See also Tate D40192, another colour study connected to the painting on the same tentative terms by Shanes;7 as it is on the other side of a sheet from a study more convincingly related to Turner’s Picturesque Views in England and Wales, both are to be found in the ‘England and Wales Colour Studies c.1825–39’ category of this catalogue.

Verso:

Blank; slight vertical pencil strokes bottom left. Inscribed in ?chalk ‘72’ top left, upside down.