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

This vignette, engraved by Robert Wallis, appears as the end-piece to the second section of Rogers’s Italy, which concludes with a lengthy reflection on the life of William Tell.1 The Swiss national hero is perhaps best known for successfully shooting an apple from atop his son’s head. Legend has it that he was arrested in the early fourteenth century for defying the tyrannical Austrian bailiff, Baron Gessler. On the way to prison, however, he escaped and assassinated Gessler, sparking the rebellion that led to Swiss independence from the Habsburg empire. Although there is no historical proof that Tell actually existed, his tale has been central to Swiss national mythology since the sixteenth century and a chapel has long stood on the spot where he is said to have leapt ashore to escape his enemy. By the early nineteenth century, Tell had become a symbol of republican freedom, both in Switzerland and throughout Europe, and his story would have been familiar to many of Rogers’s readers. This is perhaps most clearly evidenced by the success of Friedrich von Schiller’s republican drama, Wilhelm Tell (1804–5) and the resulting opera by Gioachino Rossini (first performed in 1829).

In Italy, Rogers celebrates Tell’s defence of liberty, making several references to the chapel on the Lake of Lucerne:

Comparison between this vignette and Turner’s earlier sketches of Tell’s chapel suggests that the artist made a deliberate decision to focus on the chapel for the purposes of this illustration. Prior to this time, Turner had produced three views of Tell’s Chapel. The earliest of these, Tell’s Chapel, Lake of Lucerne, circa 1794–7 (British Museum) was produced long before Turner’s first visit to Switzerland and was probably based on a drawing by John Robert Cozens (1752–97). The other two works are sketches that Turner made while on a boat tour of the lake in 1802 (see Tate D04730, D04731; Turner Bequest LXXVI 70, 71). All of these images pay far more attention to the dramatic scale of the surrounding landscape rather than to the chapel itself. By contrast the vignette is more concerned with the architecture of the building. Turner has made two small pencil studies of the steeple of the chapel in the margin at the bottom right-hand side of the illustration. There is also a potential preliminary study (see Tate D27622; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 105).

By placing greater focus on Tell’s chapel, Turner draws the viewer’s attention to key themes in Rogers’s text. However, the building and the steep outcrop behind it also serve a clear formal purpose since these strong vertical elements are echoed by the book’s binding, which lies just to the right of the image. Turner’s next vignette, St Maurice (see Tate D27664; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 147), appears on the opposite page and contains an equally strong vertical, this time on the left side the composition (although the pages were separated by a plain sheet to protect both engravings from smudging). Adele Holcomb has pointed to the subtle symmetry and deliberate pairing of these two images as evidence of the thought and care that was lavished upon the design of the book.2 Further evidence that the images were conceived as a pair is given by their stylistic similarities and by the fact that both were engraved by Robert Wallis in 1827.3

Verso:

Inscribed by unknown hands in pencil ‘7a’ centre right and ‘CCLXXX.155’ bottom centre
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 155’ centre