Turner had visited the Swiss Alpine site on his first Continental tour in 1802; the bridge over the Reuss, south of Altdorf near Wassen (towards the St Gotthard Pass), is also known as the
Pfaffensprung (Priest’s Leap). Rawlinson noted it had ‘been for many years unused. A new one has been substituted higher up’
1 and the area has since been exploited for hydroelectric works.
2 There are two pencil drawings of the bridge in the
Lake Thun sketchbook (Tate
D04732,
D04733; Turner Bequest LXXVI 72, 73). The first is a vertical sketch with its lower half given over to the rocky chasm, of necessity only implied in the horizontal
Liber design; for the second, the page was used in ‘landscape’ format, and the drawing is closer to the final composition. The ledge and trees (though not the skeleton) in the foreground of the design appear to derive from a sketch from further away and below, in the
St Gothard and Mont Blanc sketchbook (Tate
D04628; Turner Bequest LXXV 36), while watercolour studies in the latter book include similar combinations of battered trees and rocks (for example Tate
D04607,
D04610,
D04627; Turner Bequest LXXV 15, 18, 35).
