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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Chamonix: Mont Blanc and the Arve Valley from the Path to the Montenvers 1802

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Chamonix: Mont Blanc and the Arve Valley from the Path to the Montenvers 1802
D04610
Turner Bequest LXXV 18
Pencil, black chalk, watercolour and gouache with scratching out on white wove paper prepared with grey wash, 318 x 472 mm
Stamped in black ‘LXXV 18’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
John Russell and Andrew Wilton consider this composition, though faded by exposure, ‘one of the grandest’ from this sketchbook with a pronounced diagonal stress that ‘seems to have embodied for [Turner] the dynamic essence of Alpine landscape’.1 In this respect it is similar to the drawing taken from closer to the trees by the track up the Montenvers, also from the sketchbook (D04607; Turner Bequest LXXV 15). Russell and Wilton identify the distant mountains here as the Dôme du Goûter and Aiguille du Goûter, and the Glacier des Bossons on the right. More recently Eric Shanes has described this as a view south-westwards down the valley of the River Arve, across a wide swathe of the Montenvers, with Mont Blanc high on the left. He identifies the watercolour made from it for Walter Fawkes and signed and dated 1809 (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester)2 as the Montanvert, Valley of Chamouni shown in Fawkes’s exhibition of his collection at 45 Grosvenor Place in 1819.3
1
Russell and Wilton 1976, p.43.
2
Wilton 1979, p.343 no.387, as ‘The Valley of Chamouni‘.
3
Eric Shanes, ‘Identifying Turner’s Chamonix water-colours’, The Burlington Magazine, vol.142 no.1172, November 2000, p.692
Verso:
Blank, inscribed perhaps by a later hand in pencil ‘4’ within a circle

David Blayney Brown
October 2011

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘Chamonix: Mont Blanc and the Arve Valley from the Path to the Montenvers 1802 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, October 2011, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, August 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-chamonix-mont-blanc-and-the-arve-valley-from-the-path-to-the-r1146517, accessed 21 November 2024.