Sallanches and the River Arve, from the St Martin Road

1802

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

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Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of: St Gothard and Mont Blanc Sketchbook
Medium: Graphite and chalk on paper
Dimensions: Support: 315 x 473 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference: D04604
Turner Bequest LXXV 12

Catalogue entry

For St Martin and Sallanches in this sketchbook see notes to D04602; Turner Bequest LXXV 10. This view of Sallanches was made from the road beside the River Arve, looking south over the old town with the church and bridge in the middle distance and the Pointe Percée rising in the background on the right. It became the basis of a watercolour made for Walter Fawkes (private collection)1 which has been variously dated between 1805 2 and 1815 3 and is presumably the ‘St Martin’s brig’ [sic] cited in a list of Alpine subjects (verso of Tate D08253; Turner Bequest CXX m).4 The watercolour was shown as ‘St Martin and Salenche, Savoy’ in Fawkes’s exhibition of his collection at his town house at 45 Grosvenor Place in 1819.

Turner listed ‘Vale near St. Martin’ among subjects commissioned, in hand or ‘done’ at the front of his album of 1802 dawings (see Technical notes to the Grenoble sketchbook, Tate
Turner Bequest LXXIV).

A pencil drawing on a large separate sheet depicts the same subject (Tate D04891; Turner Bequest LXXIX Q).

Wilton 1979, pp.342–3 no.380.

Butlin, Wilton and Gage 1974, p.48.

Eric Shanes, ‘Identifying Turner’s Chamonix water-colours’, The Burlington Magazine, vol.142 no.1172, November 2000, p.694.

Hill, Warburton and Tussey 1980, p.59.

Verso:

Blank

Inscribed by an unknown hand in pencil ‘248’

David Blayney Brown
November 2011

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