Devil’s Bridge, Mt St Gothard

Provenance:
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C.S. Bale by 1872; sold Christie’s, London, 14 May 1881 (185), £131 5s.
Bought by Agnew
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J. Irvine Smith by 1906 and in 1908
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George Cathcart, 5th Earl Cathcart by 1921
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Sir Joseph Duveen, later Baron Duveen of Millbank by 1922

Engraved:
(see main catalogue entry)

Turner visited the St Gotthard Pass, a major Alpine route between central Switzerland and northern Italy, on his first visit to the Continent in 1802. The present work (engraved for the Liber Studiorum but not published) is one of several Liber designs based on sketches in the St Gothard and Mont Blanc sketchbook (see also Tate D08123, D08153, D08161, D08164; Turner Bequest CXVI V, CXVII Y, CXVIII J, Vaughan Bequest CXVIII G; in addition, Mer de Glace1 may have been etched directly from another page in the book). The first of these, the drawing for the published Liber design of the nearby Little Devil’s Bridge (Tate D08123; Turner Bequest CXVI V), may have been developed in parallel; Mt St Gothard shows a third view on the same route (for drawing see Tate D08113; Turner Bequest CXVI L; the second part of the present work’s current title is by analogy with the lettering of the published print after the latter). The three compositions appear successively in Turner’s MS list of ‘Mountainous’ subjects (see below), and Turner might have originally intended the two bridges as a pair.

The present design is loosely based on a vertical colour study in the St Gothard book (Tate D04626; Turner Bequest LXXV 34), which was also the source for an upright oil painting of about 1803–4 (private collection).2 The mules and soldiers behind the parapet to the right of the latter also appear here, though less prominently and spread out along the extended right half of the horizontal composition – including one looking down ‘to call attention to the depth of the precipice’.3 The military presence was topical as the bridge, over the Reuss in the Schöllenen Gorge on the route through the St Gotthard Pass near Andermatt, had been destroyed during recent fighting between the French and Russians and reconstructed (it was rebuilt again in the 1830s and survives, superseded by a modern bridge).4 In Modern Painters, Ruskin described the composition as the ‘noblest’ in the Liber,5 and considered the etching (usually attributed to Turner) ‘the grandest piece of rock-drawing, I suppose, in the world.’6