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Lot Essay
In the summer of 1836 Turner set out on a tour of the Alps, which has been seen as a reawakening of interest in mountain scenery, and as such a prelude to his celebrated annual visits to Switzerland in the first half of the 1840s. He was accompanied by his friend and patron Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Noar (1797-1864), a wealthy Scottish landowner, who was also an amateur artist. The plan was to return to some of the places Turner had recorded many years earlier, on his first Continental journey, which had focused on the routes around Mont Blanc. But whereas Turner had pressed no further south in 1802 once he reached Aosta, this later tour continued through the whole Val d’Aosta to Ivrea and then Turin. At that stage Turner and Munro went their separate ways, with the artist heading homewards via the Mont Cenis pass, Chambéry and thence the Rhone valley north in the direction of Paris.
As they snaked their way up and over the Mont Blanc massif, and then down through the Val d’Aosta, both men sketched and painted, but each respected the other’s privacy while working. Indeed Turner famously avoided sharing his processes, but on this occasion he provided Munro with stage-by-stage studies to hint by example how his images evolved. Munro subsequently lamented that he had not been able to persuade Turner to sell him the colour sketches made on the journey. Many of them remained in Turner’s possession and thereafter became part of his bequest to the nation in 1856 (now at Tate Britain). But during the second half of the nineteenth century notable collectors such as Thomas Greenwood, Henry Vaughan and John Edward Taylor somehow acquired many of the finest of the watercolours produced on, or in response to the 1836 tour (See Wilton 1979, pp.471-4; and Hill 2000). Although Munro recalled Turner working in colour on the spot at times, debate continues about the extent to which he reworked his studies subsequently, away from his motifs. In this work, for example, the apparently casual, rather fluid brush marks near the top of the sheet linger from the early stages of work on the design, while the paths winding through the mountains, and the vaporous clouds rising from them, are more likely to have required more delicate resolution once the pressures of travel had been put aside.
The present watercolour is relatively unknown, not having been exhibited or sold for well over forty years. It’s fusion of bruised pinks and lively yellow highlights is characteristic of the 1836 studies, as are the areas of dark blue suggesting shadows. For example, a similar range of tones can be found in two views of Chambéry, recorded in the latter stages of the journey (see Hill 2000, nos.14 and 78; although described there as ‘Sallanches’, the former has since also been re-identified: see I. Warrell in Dena M. Woodall (ed.), Picturing Nature. The Stuart Collection of 18th and 19th-Century British Landscapes and Beyond, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 2025, pp.116-9).
There are also parallels with the palette range in some of the Val d’Aosta scenes now in the Metropolitan Museum or the National Galleries of Edinburgh or Dublin, but the scale and depth of the landscape Turner is representing here is much vaster and less confined. Rather than a Val d’Aosta scene, in his pioneering study of the1836 tour David Hill linked the watercolour with pencil jottings made on the Mont Cenis pass in the Fort Bard sketchbook, placing it appropriately in the sequence of watercolours shortly before the Chambéry subjects.
The first known owner of this work was the distinguished Manchester Turner enthusiast J.E. Taylor, who donated much of his collection to found the Whitworth Art Gallery, as a means of offering the citizens of his native city paintings of a quality to rival those in London galleries. At the landmark sale of the rest of Taylor’s collection in 1912, this work was acquired by H. Gibbs along with another watercolour from the 1836 tour (Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; Wilton 1453). Known as A Mountain Gorge, it is shares the same paper format and pigments as the group of views Turner made at Pre St Didier on the southern side of Mont Blanc. The two watercolours thereafter remained together until they were separated at a sale in 1960.
Prior to 1942 they had been in the collection of the heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney, by then in her second marriage as Mrs Leonard Knight Elmhirst. Noted for their benevolent work, the couple were especially connected with the restoration of Dartington Hall, near Totnes, in Devon, where they sought to give substance to Rabindranath Tagore’s ideals for new approaches to education and the arts.
We are grateful to Ian Warrell for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.
As they snaked their way up and over the Mont Blanc massif, and then down through the Val d’Aosta, both men sketched and painted, but each respected the other’s privacy while working. Indeed Turner famously avoided sharing his processes, but on this occasion he provided Munro with stage-by-stage studies to hint by example how his images evolved. Munro subsequently lamented that he had not been able to persuade Turner to sell him the colour sketches made on the journey. Many of them remained in Turner’s possession and thereafter became part of his bequest to the nation in 1856 (now at Tate Britain). But during the second half of the nineteenth century notable collectors such as Thomas Greenwood, Henry Vaughan and John Edward Taylor somehow acquired many of the finest of the watercolours produced on, or in response to the 1836 tour (See Wilton 1979, pp.471-4; and Hill 2000). Although Munro recalled Turner working in colour on the spot at times, debate continues about the extent to which he reworked his studies subsequently, away from his motifs. In this work, for example, the apparently casual, rather fluid brush marks near the top of the sheet linger from the early stages of work on the design, while the paths winding through the mountains, and the vaporous clouds rising from them, are more likely to have required more delicate resolution once the pressures of travel had been put aside.
The present watercolour is relatively unknown, not having been exhibited or sold for well over forty years. It’s fusion of bruised pinks and lively yellow highlights is characteristic of the 1836 studies, as are the areas of dark blue suggesting shadows. For example, a similar range of tones can be found in two views of Chambéry, recorded in the latter stages of the journey (see Hill 2000, nos.14 and 78; although described there as ‘Sallanches’, the former has since also been re-identified: see I. Warrell in Dena M. Woodall (ed.), Picturing Nature. The Stuart Collection of 18th and 19th-Century British Landscapes and Beyond, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 2025, pp.116-9).
There are also parallels with the palette range in some of the Val d’Aosta scenes now in the Metropolitan Museum or the National Galleries of Edinburgh or Dublin, but the scale and depth of the landscape Turner is representing here is much vaster and less confined. Rather than a Val d’Aosta scene, in his pioneering study of the1836 tour David Hill linked the watercolour with pencil jottings made on the Mont Cenis pass in the Fort Bard sketchbook, placing it appropriately in the sequence of watercolours shortly before the Chambéry subjects.
The first known owner of this work was the distinguished Manchester Turner enthusiast J.E. Taylor, who donated much of his collection to found the Whitworth Art Gallery, as a means of offering the citizens of his native city paintings of a quality to rival those in London galleries. At the landmark sale of the rest of Taylor’s collection in 1912, this work was acquired by H. Gibbs along with another watercolour from the 1836 tour (Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; Wilton 1453). Known as A Mountain Gorge, it is shares the same paper format and pigments as the group of views Turner made at Pre St Didier on the southern side of Mont Blanc. The two watercolours thereafter remained together until they were separated at a sale in 1960.
Prior to 1942 they had been in the collection of the heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney, by then in her second marriage as Mrs Leonard Knight Elmhirst. Noted for their benevolent work, the couple were especially connected with the restoration of Dartington Hall, near Totnes, in Devon, where they sought to give substance to Rabindranath Tagore’s ideals for new approaches to education and the arts.
We are grateful to Ian Warrell for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.