The Source of the Arveyron below the Glacier du Bois and Mer de Glace

1802

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of: St Gothard and Mont Blanc Sketchbook
Medium: Graphite, watercolour and gouache on paper
Dimensions: Support: 313 x 468 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference: D04613
Turner Bequest LXXV 21

Catalogue entry

This vivid coloured drawing served as the basis of the watercolour made for Walter Fawkes and, as argued by David Hill and more recently by Eric Shanes, exhibited as Glacier and Source of the Arveron, Going up to the Mer de Glace at the Royal Academy in 1803 (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff).1 The fountain of the River Arveyron is shown in the immediate foreground, among the rocks of a cave at the base of the former Glacier du Bois emanating from the Mer de Glace. In the near middle distance are the ice-worn Rochers des Mottets and above, the peaks of the Aiguilles du Dru and Verte. As the present author noted at the time of the 1998 Tate/Martigny exhibition, Turner’s label ‘Chamoni source de Arveiron’ must have belonged to the drawing and he also listed ‘Source of the Arveron’ 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). Technically and stylistically, the more finished Cardiff version is very close to the 1802 original, its emphasis on the contrasting surfaces and textures of ice and rock being, in Hill’s words, an example of the ‘theme of engagement with matter’ developed in Turner’s work after his Alpine tour.2 In the watercolour, Turner introduced a snake, ‘to provoke reflection on the pessimism of the postlapsarian curse, or on the utopianism of the natural idyll’.3

Turner made a coloured study on a larger separate sheet, concentrating on the source of the river and the glacier rather than the distant mountains and omitting the rocks in the foreground (D04887; Turner Bequest LXXIX M).

The present drawing, with another from this sketchbook (D04612; Turner Bequest LXXV 20), was used the plate The Source of the Arveron in the Valley of Chamouni Savoy for the Liber Studiorum, via the study (Tate D08161; Turner Bequest CXVIII G). Forrester suggests that this may have intended to form a pair with another Alpine subject, Mill near the Grande Chartreuse.4

Wilton 1979, p.342 no.376, as ‘Montanvert, Valley of Chamouni’; for the change of title, Hill 1980, p.62, Shanes 2000, p.692.

Hill 2000, p.273.

Ibid.

Forrester 1996, p.122.

David Blayney Brown
October 2011

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