077/06
23 May 2006
Culture Minister Defers Export of Two Watercolours By JMW Turner, The Lake of Lucerne And The Dark Rigi
Culture Minister, David Lammy, has placed a temporary export bar on two watercolours by JMW Turner, the Lake of Lucerne and the Dark Rigi. This will provide a last chance to raise the money to keep the paintings in the United Kingdom.
The Minister's rulings follow recommendations by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, run by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. The Committee recommended that the export decision for the Lake of Lucerne and the Dark Rigi be deferred on the grounds that they were of outstanding aesthetic importance. The Committee also recommended that the decision on the Dark Rigi be deferred on the grounds that it was of outstanding significance for the study of the work of JMW Turner and, in particular, his mature works.
The Lake of Lucerne was painted in about 1815 and has long been recognised as one of Turner's finest achievements in watercolour. It is the culmination of a series of nine important and ground breaking large Swiss views. Turner conveys the sublimity of the Alpine setting and transient atmospheric effects with dazzling virtuosity. His evocation of rising mists and clouds gives a credible sense of depth and perspective, while demonstrating their insubstantiality at the same time.
The Dark Rigi was painted in 1842 and is part of a set of ten watercolours, which are regarded as amongst the finest achievements not only of Turner, but also the watercolour medium. It is a consummate example of Turner's work, which demonstrates his skilled use of scratching out and stippling to lend texture to the surface of the paper. The Rigi, a mountain peak, is shown rising above Lake Lucerne at sunrise and its defining dark tone reflects Turner's interest in the transforming effects of lighting and atmospheric effects. The existence of preparatory sketches at Tate provides an exciting context for the study of this masterpiece.
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The decision on the export licence application for both paintings will be deferred for a period ending on 22 July inclusive. In each case, this period may be extended until 22 November inclusive if a serious intention to raise funds with a view to making (i) an offer to purchase the Lake of Lucerne at the recommended price of £2,088,800 (excluding VAT) is expressed; (ii) an offer to purchase the Dark Rigi at the recommended price of £2,700,000 (excluding VAT) is expressed. Offers from public bodies for the Dark Rigi for less than the recommended price through the private treaty sale arrangements, where appropriate, will also be considered by David Lammy. Such purchases frequently offer substantial financial benefit to both parties by the sharing of tax advantages.
Anyone interested in making an offer to purchase one or both paintings should contact the owner's agent through:
The Secretary
The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest
Museums, Libraries and Archives Council,
Victoria House,
Southampton Row
London WC1B 4EA
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Notes to Editors
1. From April 2005, responsibility for administering the work of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA) was passed by DCMS to the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). Media enquiries on the operation and casework arising from RCEWA and from the Acceptance in Lieu and Government Indemnity Schemes and the export licence system should go to Sharene Chatfield on 020 7273 1459, email sharene.chatfield@mla.gov.uk
2. The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest is an independent body, run by MLA, which advises the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport on whether a cultural object, intended for export, is of national importance under specified criteria. Where the Committee finds that an object meets one or more of the criteria, it will normally recommend that the decision on the export licence application should be deferred for a specified period. An offer may then be made from within the United Kingdom at or above the fair market price.
3. Pictures of these items can be downloaded free of charge from the MLA site on Pixmedia. Please go to:
Lake of Lucerne: http://www.pixmedia.co.uk/25/image/3138
Dark Rigi: http://www.pixmedia.co.uk/25/image/3139
4. Both paintings are in excellent condition.
5. Turner's Swiss views record an important development in the pattern of British responses to Europe. The middle years of the nineteenth century saw the promotion of Switzerland as a specifically British holiday destination.
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The Lake of Lucerne
6. The Lake of Lucerne appears to have been painted in 1815, as the climax of a sequence of nine large-scale evocations of the Alps, all of which were based on material gathered during Turner's first European tour of 1802, when the Peace of Amiens temporarily permitted travel on the Continent. Though forced by the resumption of war to confine his travels thereafter to Britain, between 1803 and 1815 Turner completed many realisations of the sublime scenery he had encountered in France and Switzerland. But the most influential and widely praised were his powerful large watercolours, which seemed to rival the force and naturalism of what it was possible to achieve in oil paint, at the same time offering subtler effects and colouring. Each design was painted on a sheet of paper of the very largest format available to Turner, in effect equalling the size of oil paintings, and thereby contributing to Turner's attack on preconceived ideas of the limitations of his favoured medium.
7. The Lake of Lucerne was one of four watercolours shown at the Academy in 1815, the others being: The Passage of Mount St Gotthard from the Devil's Bridge, c.1804 (Abbot Hall Gallery, Kendal); The Great Fall of the Reichenbach, c.1804 (Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford); and The Battle of Fort Rock, Val d'Aouste, Piedmont 1796 (Turner Bequest, Tate). These four watercolours exhibited in 1815 were clearly conceived as a group, and it has been convincingly argued by Professor David Hill, who has worked most closely on Turner's early Swiss subjects, that the Lake of Lucerne and the Battle of Fort Rock (now in Tate Collection) were specifically intended as pendants, offering opposing states of war and peace. This was particularly significant in 1815. Indeed, the balance of power in Europe that Turner was contemplating in his images shifted significantly as a result of the Allied victory at Waterloo in June 1815, an event which took place during the period that the watercolours hung on the Academy's walls.
8. As the last in the sequence of large Swiss views, the Lake of Lucerne watercolour skilfully draws on the complicated techniques that had characterised this important experimental and ground-breaking series. Colours are effortlessly blended and scratched on the surface of the paper to suggest the forests rising above the lake.
9. The perception that Britain had, at last, established its own original art form – the water-colour painting - was initially a jingoistic claim that gathered momentum during the first decade of the new century, but which seemed to be set in stone when Walter Fawkes displayed his large collection of watercolours by Turner and other artists at his London home at Grosvenor Place in 1819 (and again in 1820). The exhibition was extensively and favourably reviewed in the burgeoning art press, attracting foreign, as well as British visitors. Fawkes of Farnley Hall, Yorkshire, was Turner's most important collector.
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The Dark Rigi
10. Turner's late Swiss sets have remained one of the most highly rated aspects of his works and within this grouping the three views of mountain peak known as the Rigi, which can be seen from Lucerne, are seen as especially important. Each shows the mountain at a different time of day and is characterized by a defining colour or tone (Dark, Blue or Red). Turner's interest in the ways in which different lighting and atmospheric effects transformed the same motif, studied from the same viewpoint, clearly foreshadows the later serial approaches of several later artists, including Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne.
11. Ideally the three Rigi views should be seen in conjunction to understand fully Turner's preoccupation with the changes of light on his subject. The Red Rigi, now in Melbourne, depicts a sunset effect on the mountain, while the other two watercolours are concerned with the nuances of dawn. Though it is no longer possible to apprehend the combined force of the Rigi group, except in exhibitions, the works individually convey their specific moments in time, thereby making plain Turner's concept. His concentration on a prevailing colour in each design was a bold device, serving to unify each image tonally in a way that was only subsequently pursued with any sense of real purpose by the artists of the 'Aesthetic Movement' in the 1870s.
12. Turner's late Swiss watercolours were produced for a group of collectors made up of Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar (1797-1864), Elhanan Bicknell (1788-1861), Benjamin Godfrey Windus (1790-1867), together with John Ruskin and his father. During the first half of the 1840s, after his summer travels on the continent, Turner got his agent, Thomas Griffith, to show this circle of rivals the colour studies he proposed to elaborate as more conventionally finished watercolours. All but one of the studies can be found in the Turner Bequest at Tate Britain. Each collector wrote his name on the back of the subjects he had selected, and the completed works were delivered some months later, painted on sheets of paper slightly larger than the preliminary compositions. Most of these watercolours remained with their original owners until the 1860s, though they were sometimes exchanged within the circle of commissioners, who jostled with each other in their efforts to try and outshine each other's collections. Ruskin was especially covetous of the works belonging to Munro of Novar, including the two views of the Rigi - the Red and the Dark – though he was eventually only able to persuade Munro to part with the first of these.
13. The relationship between Turner's private sketches and his public statements is one of the most fascinating and rewarding areas of study, and is of especial interest for his mature work, which continues to be both controversial and popular. The Turner Bequest contains both breathtaking views of the Rigi in the 'Lucerne' sketchbook of circa 1845, and dozens of colour sketches – some still in the process of identification – which testify to the energy with which Turner stalked his subject. These also reveal the many hours of contemplative scrutiny that lie behind the sequence of three watercolours in the finished group. The possibility of studying the Dark Rigi in the context of these makes this work of outstanding importance for the purposes of study.
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