Lot Essay
Ruskin visited Lucerne several times in connection with a planned series of illustrations for his own history of Switzerland in which, in particular, he sought to demonstrate the essential relationship between the Swiss towns and their surrounding landscape; he also visited Geneva, Basel, Thun, Baden, Schaffhausen and Fribourg for this purpose. He was influenced by the Swiss views of J.M.W. Turner that he had seen as executor of Turner's estate. His first selection of Turner watercolours followed the route of his own favourite tour of Switzerland and by 1856 he saw his own views as a supplement to those of Turner. (For Ruskin's Swiss watercolours in general, and their relationship to his projected history and to the works of Turner see P. Walton, The Drawings of John Ruskin, 1972, pp.87-94).