What was Turner’s fascination with a small, sleepy town in Switzerland?

England’s greatest landscape painter visited Lucerne six times throughout his life and, as William Cook discovers, its dramatic landscape is the perfect subject for the artist’s atmospheric paintings which helped turn it into one of Switzerland’s most touristic cities

Thursday 18 July 2019 17:37 BST
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Turner’s ‘Blue Rigi’, 1842, set a British record for a watercolour when the Tate bought it for £5m
Turner’s ‘Blue Rigi’, 1842, set a British record for a watercolour when the Tate bought it for £5m

In the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, a futuristic art gallery beside Switzerland’s most beautiful lake, the museum’s director, Fanni Fetzer, is showing me her new Turner exhibition. On the gallery walls are pictures of Lucerne as Turner saw it – a one-horse town dwarfed by the mountains that tower over it. Now look out of the window. The view he painted has been transformed. Two hundred years later, that sleepy little town has become Switzerland’s most touristic city, and the artist who made it so was William Turner.

Turner visited Switzerland six times between 1802 and 1844. He travelled all over the country but the place he spent most time, by far, was Lucerne. He loved to paint Lake Lucerne and its surrounding peaks – especially Mount Rigi, aka “the Queen of Mountains”. So why was England’s greatest landscape painter so keen on Switzerland – and Lucerne in particular? Because he recognised this dramatic landscape was the perfect subject for his dramatic paintings. “Atmosphere is my style,” said Turner – and no European landscape was more atmospheric than the rugged shores of Lake Lucerne.

Today Switzerland is widely (and quite rightly) regarded as one of the world’s most idyllic tourist destinations – a peaceful, wealthy country where the trains run like clockwork, and standards of safety and comfort are unsurpassed. Yet when Turner came here in 1802 it was a land untamed, and its people were impoverished. A war-torn wilderness in the heart of Europe, it had been a battleground for centuries. It wasn’t creature comforts which drew Turner to Lucerne – it was the wildness of the place.

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