Joseph Mallord William Turner

Provenance:
...
?Henry Dawe
...
Henry Vaughan by 1872

Engraved:
Etching (attributed) and mezzotint by Henry Dawe, ‘Mill, near the Grand Chartreuse; – Dauphiny.’, published Turner, 1 January 1816

There seems to be no direct precedent for Turner’s Liber Studiorum design surviving among the sketches made of the valley of the Grande Chartreuse, in the French Alps north of Grenoble, on his first visit to the mountains in 1802. Several tonal studies in the Grenoble ‘sketchbook’ show craggy, wooded scenes in the area, and the Liber composition may have developed from various elements recorded there (Tate D04520, D04523, D04524, D04526, D04529, D04531; Turner Bequest LXXIV 27, 30, 31, 33, 36, 38).

The English poet Thomas Gray had written vividly of his 1739 visit to the area, ‘one of the most romantic, and most astonishing scenes I ever beheld’, as had William Wordsworth in his 1793 Descriptive Sketches, with the ‘death-like peace’ of the woods ‘Broke only by th’unvaried torrent’s sound.’1 Andrew Wilton has noted the site’s ‘central place in the consciousness of early searchers for the sublime among the Alps’,2 prompting Adele Holcomb’s observations on Turner’s ‘equipoise of grandeur and intimacy ... in a design that balances openness and containment.’3 Ruskin admired the ‘confined and gloomy’ aspect of the composition as an example of Turner’s ‘magnificent power of elaborating close foliage’,4 and also praised the implicit sense of height and depth of the ‘sublime’ scene,5 which he saw as being (to its advantage) in the tradition of Titian rather than Claude.6 He placed the subject among those symptomatic of the Liber’s perceived focus on ‘decay and humiliation’ and ‘patient striving with hard conditions’: