The Lauerzersee with the Ruins of Schwanau and the Mythen

In the years after Turner’s death, the watercolors resulting from his final tours of Switzerland quickly became firmly established among his most celebrated and highly prized works on paper. While the slightly larger and more resolved views that he painted on commission for a small group of admirers, such as the Pass of Splügen (lot 70), are now nearly all in museum collections, some of the watercolor sketches he made while travelling still remain in private hands. This exceptionally well-preserved, luminous watercolor is one of the finest, and has a well-documented provenance going back directly to Turner himself.

It depicts the landscape below the eastern slopes of the Rigi, the famous peak popular with nineteenth-century tourists, and the subject of many watercolors by Turner, including The Blue Rigi (1842, Tate; sold at Christie’s, 5 June 2006, lot 53). A few months after selling that work in the spring of 1842, Turner went back to Lucerne and from there undertook a circumnavigation of the Rigi, exploring the villages of Kussnacht, Arth, Goldau, and Schwyz before returning to the azure waters of Lake Lucerne at Brunnen. He carried with him one of the paper-bound, ‘roll sketchbooks’, made up of the Whatman paper he particularly favoured, and used its twenty or so pages (including this sheet) to set down the essence of scenes he encountered that had visual potential (as opposed to the rapid pencil jottings he made in his smaller pocketbook). He had honed this process over the years, but the pages of this book, which provided inspiration for at least five of the great late Swiss watercolors, demonstrate how effective he was at shaping his observations for the purposes of art.

The precise location depicted here initially eluded collectors and scholars, including even the usually assiduous A.J. Finberg, who wrote, ‘There can be no doubt about the locality which furnished the motive of this lovely vision … There in the distance are the two Mythens; and there at the edge of the lake is Brunnen. The drawing must have been made at or near Treib, on the Lake of Lucerne’ (loc cit). While he was correct in identifying the double-peaked mountain as the Mythen (Grosser, 6,227 ft; and Kleiner, 5,942 ft), Turner’s viewpoint was actually from the road along the southern edge of the Lauerzer See, around a mile from the village of Lauerz (often transcribed as ‘Lowertz’ in the 19th Century), from which the lake gets its name. Turner possibly had to continue his progress by boat, but the road now circles below the cliffs coming down from the Urmiberg and the Zünggelenflue, which in reality screen off the view towards the village of Schwyz. So the church spire at the distant water’s edge is more likely to be the Alter Kapelle at Seewen. To the left is an island with the ruins of the castle and chapel of Schwanau. Like many of the other sites he visited in the Lucerne region, the ruins conjured associations with the founding history of Switzerland in the early 14th Century, or the exploits of William Tell. In this case, Turner could have learned from Murray’s 1838 Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland that the castle was rumoured to be haunted. Perhaps that Romantic narrative influenced his decision to introduce the moon above the peaks. But in any case the hot/cold contrast of the fading golden sunset light with the rising moon was one of his favourite combinations in his later years, stemming from Lord Byron’s phrase, ‘The moon is up, and yet it is not yet night / Sunset divides the day with her’ (Childe Harold, Canto 4).

Having defined the structure of the scene so deftly in his under-drawing, Turner added washes of diluted yellow and blue, leaving traces of hasty movements with his brush; or blending them at times to add green, a colour that is surprisingly rare in his works. These overlapping tones are given more tangible substance through the addition of economic penwork, at times as neat as lines of knitting, and elsewhere more freely calligraphic. The same palette range and stylistic effects can be found on other sheets used on this tour, such as Kussnacht, Lake of Lucerne (Tate; D36053), Arth on the Lake of Zug, Early Morning (Tate, D36129), The Pass of St Gothard, near Faido (Tate; D36055), and St Gothard Pass (Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, 69.154.59; Wilton 1979 no. 1516). But the closest parallels are found in another watercolor sketch of the Mythen, seen surrounded by rainclouds, from below Schwyz, where the River Muota threatens to overflow its banks as it runs in spate (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 863; Wilton 1979, no. 1487).

Several of the sheets just mentioned were annotated with inscriptions on their versos that indicate their place in a sequence of at least fifteen sketches that appear to have been arranged as part of the process of securing commissions for the finished watercolors of 1843 (see Warrell 1995, p.151). This sheet is likely to have been among them; but was set aside by Turner and retrieved later in the 1840s, when he was working on his final ten watercolors of Switzerland, some of which were acquired by John Ruskin and H.A.J. Munro of Novar (see Wilton 1979, nos.1550, 1552, 1553, 1556, 1557, 1560, 1562, 1563, 1565, 1566). The studies for those views mostly measure 9 ¾ x 14 inches (25 x 36 cms), except four of them (including this sheet) which share the same slightly smaller dimensions, identifying them as pages from sketchbooks likely to have been used on the same tour (i.e., Wilton 1979, nos. 1494, 1516). These were presumably kept for reference at Turner’s home in Chelsea while he completed the larger versions of the images (and were then inherited by his housekeeper and companion, Mrs Booth).

One of the final ten subjects was his brooding realisation of this scene, The Lauerzer See with the Mythens (c.1848, Victoria and Albert Museum; Wilton 1979, no.1562), which was only recognised as the same setting by Eric Shanes in 1987 (loc.cit.). There Turner dispensed with the sparkling light and colour in this study, deploying instead rich earthy tones amidst vaporous mists. As Nicola Moorby has commented, in his final works ‘forms are liberated from exactness and appear only half-seen and suggested … They reveal that the vagaries and delights of the medium that Turner had made indisputably his own was an obsession which lasted until the very end of his days’ (Late Turner. Painting Set Free, Tate Britain exhibition catalogue, 2014, p.238).

We are grateful to Ian Warrell, former curator, Tate Britain, and independent scholar, for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.