Joseph Mallord William Turner

John Russell and Andrew Wilton consider this composition, though faded by exposure, ‘one of the grandest’ from this sketchbook with a pronounced diagonal stress that ‘seems to have embodied for [Turner] the dynamic essence of Alpine landscape’.1 In this respect it is similar to the drawing taken from closer to the trees by the track up the Montenvers, also from the sketchbook (D04607; Turner Bequest LXXV 15). Russell and Wilton identify the distant mountains here as the Dôme du Goûter and Aiguille du Goûter, and the Glacier des Bossons on the right. More recently Eric Shanes has described this as a view south-westwards down the valley of the River Arve, across a wide swathe of the Montenvers, with Mont Blanc high on the left. He identifies the watercolour made from it for Walter Fawkes and signed and dated 1809 (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester)2 as the Montanvert, Valley of Chamouni shown in Fawkes’s exhibition of his collection at 45 Grosvenor Place in 1819.3

Verso:

Blank, inscribed perhaps by a later hand in pencil ‘4’ within a circle