Mountains of Villeneuve

These mountains close the eastern end of Lake Geneva, above Montreux. In the Library Edition, this drawing is dated to 1846, but in his diary for 1 June 1849, Ruskin also records: “Drove to the base of my favourite Villeneuve mountain and half drew it.” He was rarely satisfied with his attempts to capture the sweeping fall of such mountains, with their “mingling of the darkness of the high upper pines and blue sky: one deep harmony, in a kind of serene moonlight,” where the “sky seemed almost lightless – a bath of melancholy twilight: heavenly beyond expression.”

The subject was engraved (in reverse) by J.H. Le Keux as Plate 40 of Modern Painters, volume IV (1856), where Ruskin describes how a “wall of upper precipice rises from the pasture land, and frets the sky with glowing serration.”