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Lot Essay
Between 1841 and 1844, Turner toured Switzerland annually in the late summer months. During these travels he filled portfolios with impressionistic studies of the places he visited, setting down the essence of each scene economically in pencil and watercolour in a way that was far in advance of what contemporary aesthetics considered ‘finished’. The idea was that these sample studies offered potential patrons the opportunity to choose the works they wished to commission Turner to develop on a slightly larger scale and to resolve to a more conventional degree of representation; for example record-breaking works such as The Blue Rigi, Sunrise (1842, Tate; Christie’s, London, 5 June 2006, lot 53). Sets of ‘finished’ watercolors of this kind were completed in 1842, 1843 and 1845 (see I Warrell, Through Switzerland with Turner, London 1995, pp. 149-155).
Although these intensely personal meditations on Swiss motifs have long since been prized as the pinnacle of his creative endeavors, this quixotic method of commissioning and selling them was ultimately limited to the circle of just four collectors: Elhanan Bicknell (1788-1861); Benjamin Godfrey Windus (1790-1867); Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar (1797-1864); and John Ruskin (1819-1900). After 1845, Munro and Ruskin - the two youngest men and the two most ardent of Turner’s supporters - continued to press him for further works in the same vein, and by 1847-8 it is apparent that he was at work on further depictions of the Swiss lakes and passes. Exactly what was commissioned, and how many items eventually produced has remained vague. However, new research has made it possible to position the present watercolor as part of a body of material from Turner’s last Swiss travels. It is actually one of a batch of about fourteen color studies that reveal the scope of the more formal watercolors he went on to develop for Ruskin and Munro. They are grouped and discussed here for the first time, prior to the publication of a more detailed analysis of the Final Swiss Set by Ian Warrell in the British Art Journal later this year.
What we see in Turner’s later studies is often indistinct or seemingly imprecise. In fact, in this work we are looking east from Thun, which by the 1840s had become the gateway to the lakes and mountains of the Bernese Oberland. By this period the first phase of intensive Swiss tourism was under way, facilitated in part by the introduction of reliable steamboats to ferry tourists to and from the more popular sights. Turner noted and featured them on Lake Lucerne in many of his views of that lake, and in this watercolor he includes the black chimney of a steamer to the right of a large building on the quayside. This is the Bateau à Vapeur, a relatively new inn, run by an enterprising local who had previously established the neighboring Hotel de Bellevue (with a commanding prospect from its garden), and who was also the owner of the steamboat. The vessel had first been introduced in 1835, immediately cutting the journey time across the lake’s ten miles from at least 3 hours by rowboat down to just over an hour.
John Murray’s highly popular Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland (first published in 1838 and much reprinted subsequently) would have been a resource Turner inevitably consulted, and was where he would have gleaned the preceding information about the steamer and its inn. The guidebook also enthused about Thun itself, claiming ‘There is not a more picturesque town in Switzerland… situated about a mile from the lake, upon the river Aar, which here rushes out of it as clear as crystal.’ (p.70).
Turner had actually already visited Thun back in 1802 on his first tour through the Alps, and had afterwards developed a pencil sketch of the towers of the town seen from the river as the basis for one of the Architectural subjects in his Liber Studiorum (Turner Bequest LXXVI 48; Tate, D04705). In returning to Thun on the same later visit that resulted in the present work, he painted a couple of watercolors that repeated the same picturesque motifs of the church and castle that had attracted his younger self (see National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, Wilton 1504; Tate, Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 350; D36211. Curiously the latter watercolor continues to be listed and exhibited by the Tate as a view of Lausanne, despite having been identified by Professor David Hill as Thun in 2000).
Both of these views of Thun, as well as the other sheets from this batch, are of the same dimensions as this watercolor, which is a distinctive and uncommon format for Turner: 9¾ x 14¼ in. (25 x 36.2 cm.). The colors used throughout the group are similarly unifying, with a preference for a blending of yellow-orange tones sometimes dulled to green, contrasted with a deep or a more sea-green blue. Some images, such as the present one, and two sold recently, are very lightly handled, with a diaphanous application of paint, as if the image is glimpsed through shifting vapor (Sotheby’s, New York, 25 January 2017, lots 82, 83). Furthermore, the delicacy of the washes resembles the apparently effortless poise of the best of Turner’s Venetian watercolors from a few years earlier (see Venice, The New Moon, Christie’s, London, 10 July 2014).
Another watercolor features a view of the River Aar, closer to where it joins Lake Thun itself, focusing on the pitched roof of the Kirche Scherzligen, and beyond it the Schloss Schadau (Christie’s, London, 8 June 1999, lot 174). Like the present work, a key element in the view is the pyramidal silhouette of the celebrated peak of the Niesen, which dominates the southern shores of Lake Thun. That work was one of several that were subsequently selected, apparently by Ruskin, for more expansive treated as part of the last set of Swiss subjects; the related work is now in the collection of Shizuoka Prefectural Museum, Japan (Wilton 1156, as Pallanza; reproduced above cat.no.1554).
Not long after Turner’s first visit to Thun, Byron had praised the outlook from the churchyard as the place’s real attraction, which is why it was so often depicted by other artists during this era. And that is essentially also the view Turner captured in this watercolor, with its alluring and mysterious representation of the distant peaks of the Jungfrau, Monch and Eigher. It is puzzling, therefore, that this notable scene does not appear to have been selected by either Ruskin or Munro as one of the subjects for Turner to advance on their behalf. In Ruskin’s case the issue may have been the implicit presence of modern tourism. Elsewhere in one of the color studies of Brunnen on Lake Lucerne that he had initially enthused over, he was dismayed to find Turner had given much greater prominence in the finished work to the tourist hotels than he was prepared to countenance himself (I. Warrell, 1995, ibid, p. 71-2, no. 32).
After Turner’s death the watercolor appears to have been owned by the newspaper magnate John Edward Taylor, the founder of the Manchester Guardian who put together one of the largest and most interesting collections of the artist’s works, much of which he presented to the Whitworth Institute in 1892. Although he retained this work long after that, during its time with Taylor the watercolor seems to have lost its connection with Thun. However, by the 1930s, when it was owned by the ceramics collector Vernon Wethered, it had once more gained that association.
We are grateful to Ian Warrell for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.
Although these intensely personal meditations on Swiss motifs have long since been prized as the pinnacle of his creative endeavors, this quixotic method of commissioning and selling them was ultimately limited to the circle of just four collectors: Elhanan Bicknell (1788-1861); Benjamin Godfrey Windus (1790-1867); Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar (1797-1864); and John Ruskin (1819-1900). After 1845, Munro and Ruskin - the two youngest men and the two most ardent of Turner’s supporters - continued to press him for further works in the same vein, and by 1847-8 it is apparent that he was at work on further depictions of the Swiss lakes and passes. Exactly what was commissioned, and how many items eventually produced has remained vague. However, new research has made it possible to position the present watercolor as part of a body of material from Turner’s last Swiss travels. It is actually one of a batch of about fourteen color studies that reveal the scope of the more formal watercolors he went on to develop for Ruskin and Munro. They are grouped and discussed here for the first time, prior to the publication of a more detailed analysis of the Final Swiss Set by Ian Warrell in the British Art Journal later this year.
What we see in Turner’s later studies is often indistinct or seemingly imprecise. In fact, in this work we are looking east from Thun, which by the 1840s had become the gateway to the lakes and mountains of the Bernese Oberland. By this period the first phase of intensive Swiss tourism was under way, facilitated in part by the introduction of reliable steamboats to ferry tourists to and from the more popular sights. Turner noted and featured them on Lake Lucerne in many of his views of that lake, and in this watercolor he includes the black chimney of a steamer to the right of a large building on the quayside. This is the Bateau à Vapeur, a relatively new inn, run by an enterprising local who had previously established the neighboring Hotel de Bellevue (with a commanding prospect from its garden), and who was also the owner of the steamboat. The vessel had first been introduced in 1835, immediately cutting the journey time across the lake’s ten miles from at least 3 hours by rowboat down to just over an hour.
John Murray’s highly popular Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland (first published in 1838 and much reprinted subsequently) would have been a resource Turner inevitably consulted, and was where he would have gleaned the preceding information about the steamer and its inn. The guidebook also enthused about Thun itself, claiming ‘There is not a more picturesque town in Switzerland… situated about a mile from the lake, upon the river Aar, which here rushes out of it as clear as crystal.’ (p.70).
Turner had actually already visited Thun back in 1802 on his first tour through the Alps, and had afterwards developed a pencil sketch of the towers of the town seen from the river as the basis for one of the Architectural subjects in his Liber Studiorum (Turner Bequest LXXVI 48; Tate, D04705). In returning to Thun on the same later visit that resulted in the present work, he painted a couple of watercolors that repeated the same picturesque motifs of the church and castle that had attracted his younger self (see National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, Wilton 1504; Tate, Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 350; D36211. Curiously the latter watercolor continues to be listed and exhibited by the Tate as a view of Lausanne, despite having been identified by Professor David Hill as Thun in 2000).
Both of these views of Thun, as well as the other sheets from this batch, are of the same dimensions as this watercolor, which is a distinctive and uncommon format for Turner: 9¾ x 14¼ in. (25 x 36.2 cm.). The colors used throughout the group are similarly unifying, with a preference for a blending of yellow-orange tones sometimes dulled to green, contrasted with a deep or a more sea-green blue. Some images, such as the present one, and two sold recently, are very lightly handled, with a diaphanous application of paint, as if the image is glimpsed through shifting vapor (Sotheby’s, New York, 25 January 2017, lots 82, 83). Furthermore, the delicacy of the washes resembles the apparently effortless poise of the best of Turner’s Venetian watercolors from a few years earlier (see Venice, The New Moon, Christie’s, London, 10 July 2014).
Another watercolor features a view of the River Aar, closer to where it joins Lake Thun itself, focusing on the pitched roof of the Kirche Scherzligen, and beyond it the Schloss Schadau (Christie’s, London, 8 June 1999, lot 174). Like the present work, a key element in the view is the pyramidal silhouette of the celebrated peak of the Niesen, which dominates the southern shores of Lake Thun. That work was one of several that were subsequently selected, apparently by Ruskin, for more expansive treated as part of the last set of Swiss subjects; the related work is now in the collection of Shizuoka Prefectural Museum, Japan (Wilton 1156, as Pallanza; reproduced above cat.no.1554).
Not long after Turner’s first visit to Thun, Byron had praised the outlook from the churchyard as the place’s real attraction, which is why it was so often depicted by other artists during this era. And that is essentially also the view Turner captured in this watercolor, with its alluring and mysterious representation of the distant peaks of the Jungfrau, Monch and Eigher. It is puzzling, therefore, that this notable scene does not appear to have been selected by either Ruskin or Munro as one of the subjects for Turner to advance on their behalf. In Ruskin’s case the issue may have been the implicit presence of modern tourism. Elsewhere in one of the color studies of Brunnen on Lake Lucerne that he had initially enthused over, he was dismayed to find Turner had given much greater prominence in the finished work to the tourist hotels than he was prepared to countenance himself (I. Warrell, 1995, ibid, p. 71-2, no. 32).
After Turner’s death the watercolor appears to have been owned by the newspaper magnate John Edward Taylor, the founder of the Manchester Guardian who put together one of the largest and most interesting collections of the artist’s works, much of which he presented to the Whitworth Institute in 1892. Although he retained this work long after that, during its time with Taylor the watercolor seems to have lost its connection with Thun. However, by the 1930s, when it was owned by the ceramics collector Vernon Wethered, it had once more gained that association.
We are grateful to Ian Warrell for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.