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

The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘A fountain (?)’), querying the proposed subject with a laconic further ‘?’.1 Finberg’s suggestion does indeed seem unusually questionable The subject, apparently included at random among architectural studies of Milan (see under folio 2 recto; D14328), appears rather to show a mountainous landscape with a high bridge, lit by lightning at the left and the crescent of a new moon at the right, with a jumble of shapes in the foreground that could equally well indicate rocks or huddled figures. Towards the top right is a thumbnail detail which may show a runaway coach followed by a bucking horse.

Folio 1 recto (D14326) shows a zigzag of lightning and billowing clouds, and may be a related observation, recollection or evocation of the same scene, perhaps stemming from Turner’s detour to the Simplon Pass as he travelled east across northern Italy, after which he made the Milan drawings here; see Nicola Moorby’s introduction to the present tour. The artist completed two watercolours of such adventures, made shortly after the winter return journey from each of his Italian tours, in 1820 and 1829: respectively Snowstorm, Mont Cenis (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery),2 with its bolting horses, and Messieurs les voyageurs on their return from Italy (par la diligence) in a snow drift upon Mount Tarrar – 22nd of January, 1829 (British Museum, London),3 with a group keeping warm round a fire.