J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner A Ravine in the Pass of St Gotthard 1802

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
A Ravine in the Pass of St Gotthard 1802
D04627
Turner Bequest LXXV 35
Pencil, chalk, watercolour and gouache with scratching out on white wove paper prepared with grey wash, 318 x 475 mm
Stamped in black ‘LXXV 35’ bottom right
Blind-stamped with the Turner Bequest monogram towards bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
For Turner’s visit to the St Gotthard Pass and Reuss Gorge in 1802 see Introduction to the sketchbook and notes to D04628; Turner Bequest LXXV 36. This dramatic and expressive study, richly coloured, was particularly admired by John Ruskin. In manuscript notes made in 1880 on Turner’s drawings of the St Gotthard, he described it as ‘the great one.’1 Ruskin recommended it for copying and there is a copy of it by Isabella Lee Jay (fl. 1882–1896) in the Ruskin Galleries, Bembridge, Isle of Wight. Although Ruskin did not own any of her works himself, he considered her copies after Turner ‘the most accurate and beautiful I have yet seen, in many respects attaining fully to the expression of the master’s most subtle qualities’2 and commissioned one by her after Thomas Matthews Rooke (1842–1942) for the Guild of St George, Sheffield.
1
Cook and Wedderburn 1904, p.371.
2
Ibid., p.578.
Verso:
Blank
Inscribed by a later hand in pencil ‘11’ within a circle

David Blayney Brown
October 2011

How to cite

David Blayney Brown, ‘A Ravine in the Pass of St Gotthard 1802 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, October 2011, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, August 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-ravine-in-the-pass-of-st-gotthard-r1146526, accessed 26 April 2024.