Dido building Carthage
The National Gallery, London
The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, J. M. W. Turner, 1842. Watercolour on paper, 29.7 × 45 cm. Tate, London. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Tate, London replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Romanticism
The Blue Rigi, Sunrise
J. M. W. Turner · 1842
- Medium
- Watercolour on paper
- Dimensions
- 29.7 × 45 cm
- Held by
- Tate, London
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Romanticism
- Country
- Switzerland
The painter
J. M. W. Turner
Turner was a barber's son from Covent Garden who entered the Royal Academy schools at fourteen, exhibited there at fifteen, and became a full Academician at twenty-six — about as fast as the English art establishment has ever moved. For the first half of his career he competed openly with the dead: specifically with Claude Lorrain, whose golden harbour scenes he set out to equal and then to surpass, and he left paintings to the nation on the condition that they hang beside Claudes so the comparison could be made. The second half is the one that matters to later painting.
Nearby
Related works
The Fighting Temeraire
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Norham Castle, Sunrise
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Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway
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Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth
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What to look at
The Rigi is a mountain above Lake Lucerne, and Turner painted it repeatedly from the same hotel window at different hours. This is the dawn one. Almost the whole sheet is washed in a single cold blue that gets fractionally warmer as it descends to the water, and the mountain itself is barely a shape — it is a slightly denser area of the same blue. The light comes from the right, where a small patch of warm pink has been lifted out and a few touches of orange put in. Look at the bottom edge: there are tiny marks that are ducks on the water and a man wading. They are perhaps three millimetres high and they are what give the mountain its scale. Nothing else in the picture tells you how big it is. This is watercolour used at the limit of how little you can put down.