Joseph Mallord William Turner

This is from a group of “sample studies” that Turner made in 1842 in Switzerland while enroute to Italy in order to obtain commissions for a group of ten large-scale fully-worked watercolors. These diaphanous wash studies were all done in a soft-cover sketchbook that Turned would roll up and carry in his pocket.

When John Ruskin, the great art critic, heard of Turner’s death, he wrote immediately to his father telling him to look for this work, and he even drew a picture of it from memory in the letter. While Ruskin initially found the preparatory drawings from Switzerland “beautiful but sketchy and imperfect” (quoted in Ian Warrell, Through Switzerland with Turner: Ruskin ’s First Selection from the Turner Bequest. London: 1995, p. 13), by the end of Turner’s life, Ruskin recognized them as the best works through which to understand Turner. The sheet was acquired by Ruskin, and when he exhibited it in an 1878 exhibition, he described it as a view from the Italian side of St. Gotthard Pass, two miles above Faido (in 1845, Ruskin had retraced Turner ’s trip through St. Gotthard Pass).