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

This is the largest of the later coloured studies or versions based on drawings made during Turner’s Alpine tour in 1802. As Finberg was the first to observe, it originated in a pencil sketch in the Lake Thun sketchbook (Tate D04726; Turner Bequest LXXVI 66) which is marked with a cross, or perhaps the letter ‘F’ indicating a commission from Walter Fawkes.

Finberg suggested that the subject of the present work is the Great St Bernard Pass, or the Jungfrau from the Lauterbrunnen road. The second location was preferred by John Russell and Andrew Wilton who offered possible identifications of the mountains as the Engelhörner, Wellhorn and Wetterhorn, indicating that the route would be the Grosse Scheidegg to Rosenlaui.1 However, Russell and Wilton also suggested the St Gotthard road below Göschenen in the Reuss valley, looking towards Wassen, the location subsequently confirmed by David Hill.2

Russell and Wilton, and afterwards Wilton independently thought the coloured version was an unfinished watercolour for exhibition or commission, rather than a separate study or ‘colour beginning’, perhaps planned as a pendant to a watercolour from Fawkes’s collection long believed to have been exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1803 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut).3 The Yale watercolour is approximately the same size. This possibility has accounted for the dating of the present work to c.1803. In fact this seems too early on stylistic grounds and Eric Shanes has argued that the Yale watercolour should be redated c.1814 and identified with a different subject in Fawkes’s collection, Mer de Glace, in the Valley of Chamouni, Switzerland.4

On the other hand, the colour study could be earlier again if Lawrence Gowing and Butlin and Joll were right in thinking that its clump of trees atop a spur of rock became the mountain-dwelling dragon in The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides exhibited in 1806 (Tate N00477).5 Alternatively, the motifs may simply share a common source, or have travelled the other way, from picture to watercolour. Whatever the basis of the connection, it suggests that Turner associated this apparently peaceful subject with contrasting wartime themes – in the case of The Goddess of Discord, the origins of the Trojan War.

Although Russell and Wilton observe that the compositions of the Tate and Yale watercolours ‘seem to form natural complements to each other’ the present writer has suggested another possible pairing, with The Battle of Fort Rock, Val d’Aouste, Piedmont, 1796 exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1815 but never sold (Tate D04900; Turner Bequest LXXX G). Since Tate’s watercolour appears to show pilgrims, this pairing would contrast the Alpine routes in peace and war.6 Turner may already have completed another large watercolour, Mont-Blanc, from Fort Roch, in the Val D’Aosta (private collection),7 which makes a feature of peacetime travel, and presumably he reviewed earlier material for suitable exhibits to mark the end of the Napoleonic War. In the event, he showed The Battle of Fort Rock with a placid view of Lake Lucerne,8 also based on the Lake Thun sketchbook (Tate D04698; Turner Bequest LXXVI 41), and two earlier watercolours.

The composition of Tate’s watercolour is particularly bold, with its diagonal sweep from upper left to lower right cut by the thrust of the road and criss-crossed by trees. The lighting is bright and fresh with sharp contrasts of sunshine and shadow. Highlights of clouds or sunlit rock are achieved through stopping out or exposure of the white paper. Although this is largely a work of memory, Hill feels that Turner’s ‘excitement is perhaps more vividly conveyed in this picture, because unfinished, than in almost any other of the products of this [1802] tour’.9

Verso:

Blank

Technical notes:

The colours are well preserved, even the blue which, as Finberg cautioned in 1909, ‘If this drawing is exposed to the light without proper precautions ... will fade very quickly’.