The Foot of Mount St. Gotthard

This sketch of the St Gotthard pass, running from Lucerne and Altdorf to Bellinzona, was one of the chief routes over the Alps for travellers of J.M.W. Turner’s (1775–1851) day. This image shows the artist abandoning topographical accuracy and realism to invoke mood and atmosphere through colour and gesture. The crisp precision of Turner’s earlier drawings of the Alps is here replaced by a vast blur of battered fragments of rock and air in which the landscape almost disintegrates.