Lake Brienz, with the Setting Moon — a late Turner watercolour reflecting his declaration that ‘atmosphere is my style’

Writing in the 1830s, the American author James Fenimore Cooper described Switzerland as ‘the noblest of all Earthly regions’. The country would also enchant Cooper’s contemporary, the British artist J.M.W. Turner, who first visited it in 1802. He was then in his late twenties.

Struck by the exhilarating mountain scenery, like nothing he had encountered on trips around his homeland, Turner was inspired to produce works such as The Pass of Saint Gotthard, Switzerland and the history painting Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps. Both offer a sense of the spectacular.

Partly because of the Napoleonic wars, which made travel to continental Europe precarious, it would be decades before Turner returned to Switzerland. He made up for lost time, though, with visits in successive summers between 1841 and 1844. The artist was now approaching 70, and his Swiss scenes from this time differ greatly from those painted early in his career. For one thing, they tend to capture calmer surroundings, as if the sexagenarian Turner were yearning for tranquillity.

These scenes were almost all watercolours, and an intriguing example titled Lake Brienz, with the Setting Moon is being offered in the Old Masters Evening Sale at Christie’s in London on 1 July 2025.

It’s thought that Turner painted it in 1842, a couple of years before he told his friend, the art critic John Ruskin, that ‘atmosphere is my style’. The picture is certainly atmospheric, and provides a view — at sunrise — across Lake Brienz in the Bernese Alps. Early rays of sun flash pink on mountains in the distance. A cliff on the left is cast in shadow, while the moon sets quietly behind clouds on the right.

Some human activity can be discerned beside a jetty in the foreground. Yet the lake remains placid, barely touched by even a breath of wind.

For many years, the work was thought to be a view of a different Swiss lake — Lucerne — but it can now be confidently identified as Brienz. This is one of a pair of watercolours recording the same scene at the eastern end of the lake, looking west. The other is found in Manchester Art Gallery, and set slightly earlier in the day.

The work coming to auction has a greater range of tones, indicative of the gaining strength of daylight between the two images. One can make out a deep recession of forests clinging to the mountainside, for example, which isn’t so readily visible in the Manchester work. What’s more, the colour of the lake in the middle distance is a stunning cobalt blue.

The moon has also sunk in the sky somewhat in the later picture, signalling the passage of time. Whether Turner completed both works on the spot is unclear. Most likely, he produced the essence of each one there, before enriching the surfaces at his leisure.

A more important point is that, in capturing the nuances of changing light in a single place across different pictures, he was anticipating the practice of Claude Monet half a century later. The Frenchman is renowned for having methodically painted successive canvases of the same scene at different times of day — for example, in his ‘Mornings of the Seine’ series, which he produced in the same spot on the eponymous river from first light to mid-morning.

Turner did this very rarely. The 1842 trip to Switzerland, however, inspired him to do so twice: with the twin pictures of Lake Brienz, and with a trio of celebrated views of a mountain called Rigi as seen across Lake Lucerne (more on which below).

At the time of Turner’s first visit, Switzerland was considered by northern Europeans to be, first and foremost, an obstacle for travellers on their well-trodden path to Italy. Over the course of the 19th century, however, the country became increasingly popular as a tourist destination.

In 1816, Mary Shelley conceived her novel Frankenstein during a stay on Lake Geneva. By 1863, the famed travel agent Thomas Cook was organising his first package holiday to Switzerland. Five years later, Queen Victoria took a month-long break in the country, partly — it is said — as a way of coping with the death of her husband Prince Albert. (The aforementioned quote from James Fenimore Cooper, incidentally, comes from Sketches of Switzerland, a book he published in 1836 based on a recent trip he had taken through the country with his family.)

It was in this context that Turner — always a savvy businessman — produced the Swiss scenes of late in his career. Which is to say, his inspiration wasn’t entirely artistic: he knew that views of a scenic, newly popular land were much coveted.

The initial provenance of the work coming to auction isn’t known, but it was probably produced in a sketchbook, the pages of which were later broken up and sold individually — with Lady Catherine Fellowes, Countess of Portsmouth, an early owner.

This year is the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth, an occasion being celebrated with exhibitions and events worldwide. He is remembered as one of the greatest of all landscapists. Initially, he produced literal representations of a given place, but by the time of Lake Brienz, with the Setting Moon, he had abandoned that approach. Topographical facts begin to dissolve into the atmosphere, his pictures increasingly now colour-led explorations of energy and light. Given its inherent fluidity, watercolour was the natural medium for this shift.

Standout examples include the aforementioned trio of works produced on the same trip as the two pictures of Brienz: The Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne, Sunrise, The Dark Rigi and The Red Rigi. Each shows the titular mountain at a different time of day and is characterised by a different colour or tone: blue, dark or red. The Blue Rigi (circa 1842), which captures a moment just before dawn, sold at Christie’s in 2006 for £5.8 million. It remains an auction record for a watercolour by the artist, and is now part of the Tate collection.

Among the keenest collectors of Turner’s Swiss watercolours was Ruskin. He acquired several examples, praising the way that they were ‘less concerned with the image of a place [than with] the spirit of a place’. Forty years after his first visit to the Alps, Turner was still scaling artistic peaks.

The 1 July 2025 Old Masters Evening Sale will be on view from 26 June to 1 July as part of Christie’s Classic Week season in London

Related artists: Joseph Mallord William Turner