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

Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

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).3

Rogers 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:

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

Several changes were made to this design during the engraving process. Most obviously, perhaps the St Bernard dog in the foreground was eliminated in the finished print, leaving only the monk and dog in the middle distance to provide some activity in an otherwise barren landscape. In the engraving, the Alpine setting has also been more dramatically rendered: the frozen lake in the foreground is darker and Turner’s sketchy mountains and blank sky have been filled in with fine details. It was common for Turner to provide only the vaguest indication of sky and background scenery in his watercolour drawings for Italy. However, his many annotations on the various trial proofs indicate that he nonetheless controlled the appearance of these details in the published versions.7

Cecilia Powell has noted that faint pencil lines drawn around the vignettes were made by the engravers during the process of squaring-up the designs for reduction.8 The inscribed numbers along the edges would also have been part of this exercise.

Technical notes:
The paper bears a watermark ‘J Whatman / Turkey Mill / 1826’.

Verso:

Inscribed by unknown hands in pencil ‘4’ top left and ‘NG’ along top and ‘6[?b]’ centre right and ‘CCLXXX.153’ bottom centre
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 153’ centre