Looking towards Lake Thun, from opposite Scherzligen, with Schloss Schadau and the Niesen in the distance, Switzerland

In August 1848 Turner finished a pair of alpine watercolours, The Brunig Pass from Meiringen to Grindelwald (Christie’s, New York, 28 January 2009, lot 37; W1550 [i]) and The Descent from St Gothard to Airolo (Koriyama City Museum of Art, Japan; W1552) for the collection of John Ruskin (1819-1900). The young art critic’s father paid £210 for the two, evidently begrudging the increase in prices since the completion of Turner’s last batch of Swiss subjects three years earlier, which had included The Lake of Lucerne, from above Brunnen. Sunset and Storm in the St. Gotthard Pass. The First Bridge above Altdorf (W1543 and W1546 both at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester). Curiously, however, many years later, when recalling the evolution of these last groups of works Ruskin had claimed that after 1845 Turner produced just one further set of two Swiss watercolours in 1850.[ii] Yet the contrary evidence in his father’s account book (now at the Ruskin Library, Lancaster University) indicates that there is clearly more to this elision of dates than meets the eye.

In fact, it is possible to glean from fragmentary clues in the correspondence between the Ruskins themselves, and their dealings with Turner in the years after 1845 that a commission had been agreed upon by at least 1847, and perhaps a year earlier, for the artist to paint a set of ten watercolours exclusively for them.[iii] By then Turner was over seventy, and the process of painting the watercolours seems to have been impeded by his increased duties at the Royal Academy and bouts of ill health. Encouragingly, in a letter in of January 1848 Turner quizzed Ruskin about how he wanted the drawings mounted, from which the collector might have hoped they were nearing completion, but as already noted, The Brunig Pass from Meiringen to Grindelwald and The Descent from St Gothard to Airolo were not delivered until August that year, and this seemed to mark the end of the commission rather than a pause in proceedings, possibly because the Ruskins were dissatisfied with the style of these latest, slightly larger works. Nevertheless, shortly after Turner’s death, Ruskin wrote from Venice to his father, urging him not to sell the first of the two, noting that as one of Turner’s last finished pictures ‘it is now valuable’, before continuing, ‘I wonder if he has destroyed the other eight – which he began for me.’[iii] However, it was a decade or so before it transpired that Turner had not destroyed them, and the other works (as well as related studies) subsequently emerged from sources that can be traced back to Sophia Caroline Booth, Turner’s erstwhile Margate landlady.[iv]

Turner’s habit with the earlier celebrated sets of Swiss (and German) subjects produced in 1842, 1843 and 1845 had been to offer prospective clients a selection of colour sketches (i.e. sample studies) he had made on his travels during the previous summer, alongside finished examples of the completed designs (i.e. the 4 finished works, including the Blue Rigi, shown in 1842). For the Ruskin group he did something similar, but he pooled two different groups of existing material: firstly a handful of sheets of Whatman paper (with an 1841 watermark) measuring around 23 x 29 cm. (see for example, The Lauerzersee, with the Ruins of Schwanau and the Mythen; Christie’s, New York, 25 January 2023, lot 68; W1488); and these were coupled with slightly wider sheets measuring about 24 x 35 cm., also on Whatman paper, but with an 1846 watermark.

The present sheet is one of the latter type, and served as the basis for the fully developed watercolour at the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art in Japan (fig. 1) (W1556). Both works have been erroneously identified in the past as Pallanza on Lago Maggiore. But in fact the location depicted can be found on the River Aare, between the lake and small town of Thun in the Bernese Oberland. This sketch belongs to a group Turner made in this area, including one of the towers of Thun itself from the river (fig. 2) (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; W1504). Another looks down over the town’s gardens and rooftops, but has often been mistaken for Lausanne (fig. 3) (Tate, D36211; TB CCCLIXIV 350), and an even more ethereal study than the present watercolour shows the new steamboat service waiting by one of the riverside hotels (fig. 4) (The River Aare at Thun, looking towards Lake Thun, with the Niesen and the Bernese Alps beyond; Christie’s, New York, 31 January 2024, lot 78; W1559).

For this and the related views of Thun Turner adopted a contrasting warm ochre and turquoise blue, generally distilling the essence of the represented forms in dissolving washes. He also supplemented this effect in some instances by outlining details with a pen, or the tip of his brush, dipped in different colours. As always, Turner sought to infuse his landscapes with the activities he had witnessed as a traveller, here focusing on the produce being unloaded from the boat.

We are grateful to Ian Warrell for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.

[i] see A. Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, London, 1979, hereafter referred to as W and their number in the catalogue raisonné.
[ii] See E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (ed.), The Works of John Ruskin, London, 1904, vol. XIII, p.194, under no.8. For the history of Turner’s sets of Swiss watercolours in the 1840s, see I. Warrell, Through Switzerland with Turner, exhibition catalogue Tate Galley, 1995, Appendix II, pp.149-155. A revised discussion by Warrell of the final set of ten watercolours produced for the Ruskins is awaiting publication.
[iii] See, for example, the letter from Turner on 21 June 1848, which refers to the ‘first two Drawings’ (J. Gage (ed), Collected Correspondence of J.M.W. Turner, Oxford, 1980, p. 220,no. 310).
[iv] J.L. Bradley (ed.), Ruskin’s Letters from Venice 1851-1852, New Haven and London, 1955, 2nd ed.1978, p. 121.
[v] See M. Krause, ‘Mrs Booth’s Turners’, The British Art Journal, Spring/Summer 2021, vol. XXII, no. 1, p. 8 n. 29.