{
"data": {
"id": 131338,
"accession_number": "1954.129",
"share_license_status": "CC0",
"tombstone": "Fl\u00fcelen, from the Lake of Lucerne, 1845. Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775\u20131851). Watercolor with gouache and scratch-away; sheet: 29.2 x 47.9 cm (11 1/2 x 18 7/8 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund, 1954.129",
"current_location": null,
"title": "Fl\u00fcelen, from the Lake of Lucerne",
"creation_date": "1845",
"creation_date_earliest": 1840,
"creation_date_latest": 1850,
"artists_tags": [
"male"
],
"culture": [
"England, 19th century"
],
"technique": "watercolor with gouache and scratch-away",
"support_materials": [
{
"description": "cream(3) wove paper",
"watermarks": []
}
],
"department": "Drawings",
"collection": "DR - British",
"type": "Drawing",
"measurements": "Sheet: 29.2 x 47.9 cm (11 1/2 x 18 7/8 in.)",
"dimensions": {
"sheet": {
"height": 0.292,
"height_inch": 11,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.5,
"width": 0.479,
"width_inch": 18,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.875
}
},
"state_of_the_work": null,
"edition_of_the_work": null,
"copyright": null,
"inscriptions": [
{
"inscription": "MFA Boston label on verso: \"Special Loan Exh. Turner, Constable and Bonington, lent by Wedgewood\"",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
"sortorder": null
}
],
"exhibitions": {
"current": [
{
"id": 361411,
"title": "Turner in America: Oils, Water Colors, Drawings, and Some Engraved Works of Joseph Mallord William Turner",
"description": "Turner in America: Oils, Water Colors, Drawings, and Some Engraved Works of Joseph Mallord William Turner. Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indianapolis, IN (organizer) (November 12, 1955-December 25, 1995); Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH (January 1-31, 1956).",
"opening_date": "1955-11-12T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 361412,
"title": "Joseph Mallord William Turner: Watercolors and Drawings",
"description": "Joseph Mallord William Turner: Watercolors and Drawings. Otto Gerson Gallery, New York, NY (organizer) (November 9-December 10, 1960).",
"opening_date": "1960-11-09T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 302281,
"title": "Landscape",
"description": "Landscape. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (January 9-April 22, 1962).",
"opening_date": "1962-01-09T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 302279,
"title": "Water Color",
"description": "Water Color. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (June 6-August 27, 1962).",
"opening_date": "1962-06-06T04:00:00"
},
{
"id": 361413,
"title": "Ruskin and His Circle",
"description": "Ruskin and His Circle. Arts Council of Great Britain (organizer) (January 17-February 15, 1964).",
"opening_date": "1964-01-17T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 361392,
"title": "Romantic Art in Britain: Paintings and Drawings 1760-1860",
"description": "Romantic Art in Britain: Paintings and Drawings 1760-1860. The Detroit Institute of Arts (organizer) (January 9-February 11, 1968); Philadelphia Museum of Art (March 14-April 21, 1968).",
"opening_date": "1968-01-09T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 302662,
"title": "Turner Watercolors from The British Museum",
"description": "Turner Watercolors from The British Museum. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (September 27-November 27, 1977).",
"opening_date": "1977-09-27T04:00:00"
},
{
"id": 304561,
"title": "Visions of Landscape: East and West",
"description": "Visions of Landscape: East and West. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 17-March 21, 1982).",
"opening_date": "1982-02-17T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 310295,
"title": "The Birth and Flowering of British Romantic Art",
"description": "The Birth and Flowering of British Romantic Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (May 1-July 22, 1990).",
"opening_date": "1990-05-01T04:00:00"
},
{
"id": 311485,
"title": "Victorian Landscape Watercolors",
"description": "Victorian Landscape Watercolors. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (November 18, 1992-January 3, 1993).",
"opening_date": "1992-09-09T04:00:00"
},
{
"id": 192019,
"title": "Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art",
"description": "Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 27-October 17, 2000); The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY (May 23-August 19, 2001); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX (October 14, 2001-January 6, 2002).",
"opening_date": "2000-08-27T00:00:00"
},
{
"id": 200485,
"title": "British Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art ",
"description": "British Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art . The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 10-May 26, 2013).",
"opening_date": "2013-02-10T00:00:00"
},
{
"id": 453007,
"title": "Julie Mehretu: Portals",
"description": "Julie Mehretu: Portals. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (July 16-November 13, 2022).",
"opening_date": "2022-07-16T04:00:00"
}
],
"legacy": [
{
"description": "Pictures and Drawings by J.M.W. Turner, R.A. London Art Gallery (1899).",
"opening_date": null
},
{
"description": "An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings, and Prints by J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and R.P. Bonington. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (March 21 - April 28, 1946).",
"opening_date": "1946-03-21T00:00:00"
},
{
"description": "An Exhibition of Paintings by J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) to Commemorate the Centennial of His Death. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (October - December, 1951).",
"opening_date": "1951-10-01T00:00:00"
}
]
},
"provenance": [
{
"description": "Hugh A. J. Munro of Novar?",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [
"\"Windus\" is inscribed on the verso of the sample study, and while B. G. Windus may have commissioned the work, Munro of Novar was apparently the first owner; for the most recent and exact commentary, see London 1995, 152-4.
"
],
"date": "?-before 1850",
"sortorder": 1
},
{
"description": "Rev. C. Upham Barry, Ryde, Isle of Wight, by descent to his daughter",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": "by c. 1850-?",
"sortorder": 2
},
{
"description": "His daughter, wife of Colonel P. G. Hewitt, Ryde, Isle of Wight",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": "?-1884",
"sortorder": 3
},
{
"description": "(her sale Christie's, London, March 25, 1884, no. 139)",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": "1884",
"sortorder": 4
},
{
"description": "Ralph Brocklebank Sr., Haughton Hall, Tarporley",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": "after 1884-?",
"sortorder": 5
},
{
"description": "Ralph Brocklebank Jr., Haughton Hall,. Tarporley",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": "?-1922",
"sortorder": 6
},
{
"description": "(his sale, Christie's, London, July 7, 1922, no. 34)",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": "1922",
"sortorder": 7
},
{
"description": "(Thomas Agnew and Sons, London)",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": "after 1922-?",
"sortorder": 8
},
{
"description": "Grace Rainey Rogers [1867-1943], New York, NY",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": "?-1943",
"sortorder": 9
},
{
"description": "(her sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, November 18, 1943, no. 41)",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": "1943",
"sortorder": 10
},
{
"description": "Walter F. Wedgwood, New York, NY",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": "after 1943-?",
"sortorder": 11
},
{
"description": "(Durlacher Brothers, New York, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH)",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": "?-1954",
"sortorder": 12
},
{
"description": "Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": "1954-",
"sortorder": 13
}
],
"find_spot": null,
"related_works": [],
"former_accession_numbers": [],
"did_you_know": "The art critic John Ruskin described the series of watercolors to which this work belongs as \"sunset drawings,\" referring to to the fact that they were made at the end of Turner's career rather than their subject matter.",
"early_education_description": null,
"artlens_description": null,
"description": "In this watercolor, created late in his life, J.M.W. Turner depicted the small Swiss town of Fl\u00fcelen and its shimmering reflection out of violet-colored mist. The work belongs to a group of highly finished works that the artist created during several summer trips to Switzerland between 1841 and 1845. The swirling vortex of light underscores the grandeur of nature, while the inclusion of figures going about their daily lives within the vastness of the Alps is a reminder of the reality of the scene. At the time he painted this view, Turner was considered the great master of Romantic landscape painting in England.",
"external_resources": {
"wikidata": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q60781248"
],
"internet_archive": [
"https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-1954.129-fluelen-from-the-lak"
]
},
"citations": [
{
"citation": "Temple, A. G. Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Pictures and Drawings by J.M.W. Turner, and of a Selection of Pictures by Some of His Contemporaries. Exh. Cat. London: East & Blades, 1899.",
"page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: pp. 19-20, 112, no. 150",
"url": "https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044033979956"
},
{
"citation": "Wedmore, Frederick, ed. Turner and Ruskin: An Exposition of the Work of Turner from the Writings of Ruskin. London: G. Allen, 1900.",
"page_number": "Mentinoed: vol. 2, p. xi; Reproduced: opposite p. 294",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Armstrong, Sir Walter. Turner. London: T. Agnew, 1902.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: vol. 2, p. 264",
"url": "https://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/t8ff72v44"
},
{
"citation": "Carter, R. Radcliffe. Pictures and Engravings at Haughton Hall Tarporley in the Possession of Ralph Brocklebank. London: George Allen, 1904.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: pp. xi, xv, 87, no. 77; Reproduced: no. 77",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Constable, W. G., and Henry Preston Rossiter. An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Prints by J.M.W. Turner, John Constable and R.P. Bonington. Exh. Cat. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1946.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 21, no. 44",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "An Exhibition of Paintings by J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) to Commemorate the Centennial of His Death. Exh. Cat. Toronto: Art Gallery of Toronto, National Gallery of Canada, 1951.",
"page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: p. 11",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "\"Accessions of American and Canadian Museums, October - December 1953.\" Art Quarterly 7 (Summer 1954).",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 183",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Francis, Henry. \"A Water Color by J.M.W. Turner in the Cleveland Museum of Art.\" Art Quarterly 17 (Winter 1954): 427-9.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: pp. 427-9; Reproduced: p. 429",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Francis, Henry Sayles. \"A Water Color by J. M. W. Turner.\" Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 41, no. 9 (1954): 201-3.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: pp. 201-3",
"url": "https://www.jstor.org/stable/25141990"
},
{
"citation": "Turner in America: Oils, Water Colors, Drawings, and Some Engraved Works of Joseph Mallord William Turner, English, 1775-1851. Exh. Cat. Indianapolis: Art Association of Indianapolis, 1955.",
"page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: no. 47",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.",
"page_number": "Mentioned and Reproduced: cat. no. 477",
"url": "https://archive.org/details/CMAHandbook1958/page/n87"
},
{
"citation": "Great Master Drawings of Seven Centuries. Exh. Cat. New York: Wittenborn, 1959.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: pp. 91-92, no. 84; Reproduced: pl. LIX",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Joseph Mallord William Turner, Watercolors and Drawings. Exh. Cat. New York: Otto Gerson Gallery, 1960.",
"page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: no. 43",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Ruskin and His Circle. Exh. Cat. London: London Arts Council, 1964.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 31, no. 104",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 183",
"url": "https://archive.org/details/CMAHandbook1966/page/n207"
},
{
"citation": "Hawes, Louis. \"Turner in New York.\" Burlington Magazine 108, no. 759 (1966): 311-16.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 312",
"url": "www.jstor.org/stable/874986"
},
{
"citation": "Cummings, Frederick J., and Allen Staley. Romantic Art in Britain; Paintings and Drawings, 1760-1860. Exh. Cat. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1968.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 15, 26, 196-8, no. 121; Reproduced: no. 121",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 183",
"url": "https://archive.org/details/CMAHandbook1969/page/n207"
},
{
"citation": "Cormack, Malcolm. J.M.W. Turner, R.A., 1775-1851. Exh. Cat. Cambridge: Fitzwilliam, 1975.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 70, under no. 44",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Wilton, Andrew. Turner in the British Museum: Drawings and Watercolours. Exh. Cat. London: British Museum, 1975.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 157, under no. 287",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Wilton, Andrew. Turner in Switzerland. Zu\u0308rich: De Clivo, 1976.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 139, no. 93",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 208",
"url": "https://archive.org/details/CMAHandbook1978/page/n228"
},
{
"citation": "Wilton, Andrew. J.M.W. Turner: His Art and Life. New York: Secaucus, 1979.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 244, 478, under no. 1483, 486, no. 1549; Reproduced: fig. 1549",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "\"Visions of Landscape East and West.\" Asia 4, no. 5 (January/February 1982): 24-9.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 28",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Ditner, David C. \"Claude and the Ideal Landscape Tradition in Great Britain.\" The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 70, no. 4 (1983): 147-63.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: pp. 159-60, 163 n. 48; Reproduced: fig. 9",
"url": "www.jstor.org/stable/25159812"
},
{
"citation": "Wilton, Andrew. Turner in His Time. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 213",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Wilcox, Scott, and Christopher Newall. Victorian Landscape Watercolors. Exh. Cat. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1992.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: pp. 72-3, no. 8; Reproduced: p. 73",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "J.M.W. Turner, 1775-1851: Watercolours and Drawings from the Turner Bequest. Exh. Cat. Charleroi: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1994.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 242, under no. 83",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Warrell, Ian. Through Switzerland with Turner. Exh. Cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1995.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 79, under no. 38, p. 150, 154; Reproduced: fig. 50",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "DeGrazia, Diane, and Carter E. Foster. Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2000.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: pp. 8, 192-3, 294-5; Reproduced: p. 193",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Cleveland Museum of Art. The CMA Companion: A Guide to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014.",
"page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: P. 162",
"url": ""
},
{
"citation": "Arendsee, M., and M. Steinman-Arendsee. \"Take the CAN disability aesthetics tour, at the Cleveland Museum of art.\" CAN Journal (Winter 2019/20): 76-87.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 78",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Imhof, Michael, and J. M. W. Turner. William Turner: Leben und Werk. Petersberg : Michael Imhof Verlag, 2023.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 232",
"url": ""
}
],
"url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/1954.129",
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"creditline": "Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund",
"image_credit": null,
"sketchfab_id": null,
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"athena_id": 131338,
"creators": [
{
"id": 1280,
"description": "Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775\u20131851)",
"extent": null,
"qualifier": null,
"role": "artist",
"biography": "Joseph Mallord William Turner, the supreme landscape painter of the romantic era, had the exceptional good fortune to be the son of a Covent Garden barber and wigmaker who thoroughly supported his aspirations to paint pictures. As an adolescent, Turner colored engravings for the print sellers and apprenticed with architectural draftsman Thomas Malton (1726-1801). Although he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1789, Turner's substantive artistic training came from his numerous self-conducted topographical drawing tours of the British Isles in the early 1790s and from his camaraderie with Thomas Girtin (1775-1802), with whom he copied the masterworks of landscape watercolorist John Robert Cozens (1752-1799) in the collection of Dr. Thomas Monro (1759-1833). Turner submitted his first oil painting, a seascape, for exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1796 and was elected an associate member three years later, at the earliest permissible age. Devoted to the academy's lofty mission, as it had been articulated by the recently deceased Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) in his annual lectures to the students of the academy, Turner would relish his election as a full academician in 1802 and would serve as professor of perspective from 1807 until 1837. His masterpieces of the early decades (and there seems an endless succession of works with title to that distinction) were either homages to past masters of landscape painting or entirely personal interpretations of the most extraordinary range of naturalistic effects and subjects. Whether it was The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800, Indianapolis Museum of Art) and its amalgam of allusions to Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Richard Wilson (1714-1782), The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed (1818, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven), with its overt tribute to Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691), or The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810, Tate Gallery, London), with its unprecedented invention of horrific naturalistic detail that challenged conventional notions of the sublime in art, the net effect of Turner's achievement was to elevate landscape painting to a status within the traditional hierarchy of genres that it had rarely enjoyed since the seventeenth century. Unlike Constable (q.v.), Turner was an indefatigable traveler abroad. His first visit to Switzerland in 1802 resulted in a spectacular series of exhibition watercolors that boldly established watercolor painting as a vital medium of original expression. A tour of Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Rhine in 1817 was followed by his first protracted stay in Italy in 1819. After 1820 summer excursions to France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and especially Venice were almost annual occurrences. Gradually, and primarily after the 1819 Italian sojourn, Turner's palette lightened. Traditional notions of chiaroscuro, of alternating bands of light and dark earth colors, yielded to compositions orchestrated in brighter hues, in which the various colors move across the painted surface almost at will, little respecting the forms they describe but in perfect balance.\r\nDuring the 1820s and early 1830s Turner committed vast amounts of his creative capital to the production of literary and travel illustrations. These kept an entire generation of engravers employed for several decades. Despite the tendency of his era to stigmatize reproductive engraving as an inferior instrument of artistic presentation, Turner was preoccupied with its processes and potential, acutely aware that, long after his pigments had faded, his reputation would be secure in the more durable brilliance of the engraver's deftly crafted reproductions. A second trip to Italy in 1828 may partially account for the heightened coloring of Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1828, National Gallery, London), which John Ruskin described as a pivotal picture in Turner's career. But there was very little falling off in either technical or thematic invention during the last decades of Turner's life. In major oils like Snow Storm-Steam Boat Off a Harbor's Mouth (1842, Tate Gallery, London) and Rain, Steam and Speed (1844, National Gallery, London) and no less measure in the series of elaborately finished Swiss watercolors executed on commission at the end of his life, natural forms occupy an uncertain place between concrete reality and total dissolution by light into the colors and images of what Monet (q.v.) admiringly called the \"exuberant romanticism of Turner's fancy.\" Perspective can be intentionally distorted and the color schemes can approach the brazenly artificial, yet somehow the fundamental truth of Turner's vision, his faith in the supreme forces of nature and in the artist's preeminence as the mediator of that experience, continues to persuade.",
"name_in_original_language": null,
"birth_year": "1775",
"death_year": "1851",
"use_in_caption": true,
"include_extent": false,
"weight": 1
}
],
"legal_status": "accessioned",
"accession_date": "1954-02-04T00:00:00",
"sortable_date": 1840,
"date_added_to_oa": null,
"date_text": "1845",
"collapse_artists": false,
"on_loan": false,
"recently_acquired": false,
"record_type": "object",
"conservation_statement": null,
"has_conservation_images": false,
"cover_accession_number": null,
"is_nazi_era_provenance": true,
"impression": null,
"alternate_titles": [
"Fl\u00fcelen - Lake of Lucerne",
"Fluelen, from the Lake",
"Fluelen, Lake of Lucerne",
"Lake of Lucerne: Fluelen from the Bay of Uri"
],
"is_highlight": false,
"updated_at": "2026-07-24 11:49:01.901000"
}
}