This vignette was engraved by W.R. Smith and appears as the head-piece to the fourth section of Rogers’s
Italy, entitled ‘The Great St Bernard’.
1 It shows the Hospice of St Bernard, situated at the summit of the Great St Bernard Pass, the oldest of the Alpine pass routes. The existence of a hospice on this site dates back to at least the ninth century.
2 The monks who ran the establishment provided food and shelter to anyone crossing the pass. They bred the famous St Bernard dogs that were trained to find and retrieve stranded travellers. Turner also produced an end-piece for this section in which he shows two of the dogs resting after having located the body of a young girl, whom two monks are carrying away to the mortuary below (Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie).
3Rogers devotes several pages to a description of his experience at the hospice, which he praises as ‘That plain, that modest structure, promising | Bread to the hungry, to the weary rest.’
4 Turner’s illustration provides a clear visual counterpart to the poem’s description of the shelter and its frozen surroundings:
Long could I have stood,
With a religious awe contemplating
That House, the highest in the Ancient World,
And destined to perform from age to age
The noblest service, welcoming as guests
All of all nations and of every faith;
A Temple, sacred to Humanity!
...
And, just beneath it, in that dreary dale,
If dale it might be called, so near to Heaven,
A little lake, where never fish leaped up,
Lay like a spot of ink amid the snow;
A star, the only one in that small sky,
On its dead surface glimmering.
(Italy, pp.12–13)
Turner himself crossed the St Bernard Pass during his Swiss tour of 1802. Whilst there, he produced several sketches of the hospice, one of which bears particularly close compositional similarities to this vignette (see Tate
D04496; Turner Bequest LXXIV 4). Two other sketches show the hospice from a distance, surrounded by heavy snow drifts and majestic rising mountains (see Tate
D04548,
D04554; Turner Bequest LXXIV 55, 61). Following his return to England, Turner produced a colour study of the hospice, possibly as an experimental composition for the set of Swiss subjects that he made for Walter Fawkes in 1806–9 (see Tate
D25317; Turner Bequest CCLXIII 195).
5 This study bears little direct resemblance to the vignette composition for
Italy, and it seems unlikely that the two are related.
6
