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 Mont Blanc from the Road above Gex 1836

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Mont Blanc from the Road above Gex’ 1836
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Mont Blanc from the Road above Gex 1836
D40346
Chalk and pencil on paper, 237 x 308 mm
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Made on the verso of D34186 (CCCXLII 2), this is one of the studies Turner made upon his first sight of Mont Blanc during his 1836 tour of the Alps. As the Turner scholar David Hill has noted, his first view of the Mont Blanc massif, as well as Lake Geneva (or Lac Leman) and Geneva itself, would have been from the Col de la Faucille, upon the approach to Geneva below.1 For other studies associated with this location, some of which can only be connected with it in a more tentative way, see the entries for D34280, D34281, D34284, D34286 and D34288 (Turner Bequest CCCXLII 77v, 78, 81, 82v and 83v). A watercolour showing Mont Blanc in the evening light also resulted: Lac Leman (Boston Museum of Fine Arts2).
For more information about Turner’s 1836 tour of the Alps, which Turner made in the company of the wealthy Scottish landowner H.A.J. Munro of Novar, see the Introduction to this section.
1
Hill 2000, p.272.
2
Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, London 1979, p.458 no.1313.
Technical notes:
For information about the paper support, see the Technical Notes section of the entry for D34195 (Turner Bequest CCCXLII 11).

Elizabeth Jacklin
August 2019

How to cite

Elizabeth Jacklin, ‘Mont Blanc from the Road above Gex 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-mont-blanc-from-the-road-above-gex-r1204583, accessed 05 August 2025.