Joseph Mallord William Turner R.A.

J.S. Maas & Co Ltd, sold 3rd August 1961 to Walter Brandt;
thence by descent

Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner, 1979, no. 1469, p. 476;
Ian Warrell, Through Switzerland with Turner, 1995, fig. 3, p. 11 (with incorrect ownership note)

Turner's summer visit to Schaffhausen in 1841 would have coincided with the falls of the Rhine being at their most full and rapid, carrying melted snow from the Alps.  This watercolour which captured the powerful river as it cascaded down the falls enabled Turner to develop his methods to the most advanced degree.  By putting a grey wash over white paper he was able to scratch and swab highlights which capture the spray above the water, and by adding washes on wet paper with lively pencil strokes, he struck an image which, prior to photography, must have been even more remarkable in his time than today.  Today we marvel at his range of techniques, his unselfconscious speed of drawing, but in the 1840's it would also have been recognised as an astonishing realistic impression of the actual view.

Few watercolours display so clearly Turner's expressive and versatile use of this medium.  His fast and varied strokes which cut into the surface of the paper were quite clearly unique.  The contemporary account of Turner's method, witnessed by William Leighton Leitch (1804-1883) is reported in Byron Webber, James Orrock, (1903, vol. 1. p. 60), 'Mr Leitch said he stretched the paper on boards, and, after plunging them in water, he dropped the colours into the paper while it was wet, making marblings and gradations throughout the work.  His completing process was marvellously rapid, for he indicated his masses and incidents, took out half-lights, scraped out high lights, and dragged, hatched, and stippled until the design was finished.'

It was clearly a subject which he relished.  As early as 1802 when, during the Treaty of Amiens, he visited the Alps, he went to Schaffhausen and we know his impression by virtue of the Joseph Farington diaries which record Turner's comments on 1^st October 1802 'The Great Fall at Schaffhausen is 80 feet – the width of the fall about four times and a half greater than its depth.  The rocks above the fall are inferior to those above the fall of the Clyde, but the fall itself is much finer.'  From the 1802 sketches, he painted Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) which we exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1806, and which alongside good reviews was described by one newspaper as 'That is madness-he is a madman' (noted in Joseph Farington's Diary, May 5^th 1806).

This watercolour is taken from close to the same viewpoint as the oil, a little nearer to the falls, albeit nearly forty years later.  A comparison shows a different approach.  The large oil is grand, sublime and dramatic emphasising the small scale of humanity against the massive, frightening wash of the falls.  On a smaller scale and in watercolour, Turner has matched the fast and powerful movement of the falls with flying spray and he has shown just how sophisticated his methods of drawing had become in his sixties.

The watercolour is one of a group of ten probably drawn in 1841; one, Schaffhausen-moonlight (Wilton 1460, National Gallery of Scotland) is dated 1841.  It has been suggested that these sheets were once part of the Fribourg, Lausanne and Geneva sketchbook (TB CCCXXXII).  Andrew Wilton has also made some stylistic association with drawings of Germany (Wilton nos. 1327-1348) which are tentatively dated to 1844.  The difficulty in applying precise dates stems from the frequency in the early 1840's of Turner's travels on the Continent, and his use of roll sketchbooks with pages also measuring approximately 230 by 300mm.  Other sheets where he has brushed grey wash over the white paper to start with, include The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen (Wilton 1462; Courtauld Gallery), the same title (Wilton 1461; Panzer Collection, Indianapolis), Schaffhausen (Wilton 1465, Tate Gallery 1022), Falls at Schaffhausen (Wilton 1467, private collection) and (The Art Museum, Princeton University, 82-48), but in the present work, he appears to have drawn from closest to the falls.