This watercolour was engraved by Robert Wallis as the head-piece for the third section of
Italy, entitled ‘St Maurice’.
1 The bridge at St Maurice was built by the Romans, who controlled Switzerland from 58 BC until about 400 AD. Its presence in the illustration, intact and still in use, offers a clear visual link between past and present, one of the central themes of Rogers’s poem. The town of St Maurice was an established stop for many Grand Tourists en route to Rome, and Rogers devotes most of this section to a cheerful description of his stay in a local inn. However, he also includes a few verses describing the narrow stretch of the Rhone river illustrated by Turner in his vignette:
’Twas dusk; and journeying upward by the Rhone,
That there came down a torrent from the Alps,
I entered where a key unlocks a kingdom;
The mountains closing, and the road, the river
Filling the narrow pass.
(Italy, pp.9–10)
Although Turner did visit St Maurice during his 1802 trip to Switzerland, the one sketch that he made there bears no direct relation to the subject of this vignette (see Tate
D04571; Turner Bequest LXXIV 78). Cecilia Powell has demonstrated that Turner made only selective use of his sketches when composing his vignettes for
Italy, and it is likely that he painted this illustration from memory or imagination.
2Turner produced a preliminary study for
St Maurice that is closely related to this finished vignette (see Tate
D27518; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 1). Glistening light and deep perspective dominate both versions of the subject, offering a stunning example of the dramatic effects that Turner was able to achieve despite the confines of the vignette format. Like
The Chapel of William Tell (Tate
D27672; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 155), which occupies the opposite page in the book,
St Maurice shows a body of water surrounded by steep rock formations and its composition is dominated by a strong vertical on the side nearest to the book’s binding. Adele Holcomb has pointed to the deliberate pairing of these two images as indication of the thought and care that was lavished upon the design of Rogers’s
Italy.
3 Further evidence that the images were conceived as a pair is the stylistic similarity between them and by the fact that both were engraved by Robert Wallis in 1827.
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