J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1836-47 Modern painter > Tour to the Alps 1836 > Separate Sheets Associated with the 1836 ... > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Looking down the Gorge at Pre-Saint-Didier: The Church of Pre-Saint-Didier in the Distance, with the Old Bath House in the Foreground 1836

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Looking down the Gorge at Pre-Saint-Didier: The Church of Pre-Saint-Didier in the Distance, with the Old Bath House in the Foreground’ 1836
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Looking down the Gorge at Pre-Saint-Didier: The Church of Pre-Saint-Didier in the Distance, with the Old Bath House in the Foreground 1836
D36240
Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 377
Chalk and watercolour on paper, 346 x 242 mm
Stamped in black ‘CCCLXIV–377’ bottom left and bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This study has been connected to Turner’s 1836 tour of the Alps, which he made in the company of the wealthy Scottish landowner H.A.J. Munro of Novar; for more information, see the Introduction to this section.
Like D36175 and D36267 (Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 317 and 399) this view of a ravine was identified by the Turner scholar David Hill as showing the dramatic gorge and waterfall at Pre-Saint-Didier, with the village’s church seen in the distance and the old bath house indicated in the lower right.1
In palette and viewpoint this view has, by comparison to other colour studies made during the 1836 tour, something in common with the darker and more purposefully dramatic Alpine views Turner made during his 1802 tour (see, for example, Tate D04625; Turner Bequest LXXV 33); it is interesting that his visit to this gorge saw Turner not only look again at these kind of dramatic viewpoints, but also take ‘quite a scramble’ aged sixty-one in order to view the waterfall from above.2 This upper viewpoint, according to Hill, is the subject of a watercolour now in the collection of Rhode Island School of Design Museum.3 Turner also made a watercolour of the waterfall from near the thermal spring (Harrow School, Middlesex4).
It is possible that some further studies, which can only be tentatively identified, also show the gorge. See the entries for D35979, D36083 and D36212 (Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 136, 237 and 351).
For views of the surrounding landscape made from around the village of Pre-Saint-Didier, see the entry for Tate D25381 (Turner Bequest CCLXIII 258).
1
Hill 2000, pp.179, 281.
2
Ibid, p.281.
3
Ibid, p.281.
4
Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, London 1979, p.481 no.1507, as ‘The Reichenbach’, ?1844.
Verso:
Blank

Elizabeth Jacklin
August 2019

How to cite

Elizabeth Jacklin, ‘Looking down the Gorge at Pre-Saint-Didier: The Church of Pre-Saint-Didier in the Distance, with the Old Bath House in the Foreground 1836 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2019, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, August 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-looking-down-the-gorge-at-pre-saint-didier-the-church-of-pre-r1204638, accessed 12 May 2025.