2-728-970 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Flüelen, from the Lake of Lucerne, 1845. Turner’s magnificent Swiss watercolours, painted near the end of the artist’s life, represent the triumphant culmination of the golden age of British watercolour painting. Here, Turner seems to conjure the little town of Flüelen and its shimmering reflection out of violet-coloured mist. 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. The mature Turner is at his most majestic here-at the time he painted this view, he had become the great master of Romantic landscape painting in England.