But these remarks have taken me slightly out of my chronological course. The following sketches I am inclined to date conjecturally somewhere between 1835 and 1840.
Can this drawing be correctly named? It does not seem much like the other drawings and engravings of the old fortress of Rheinfels which I have compared with it. And what is the meaning of “Dib,” which Turner has written in pencil in the foreground? I cannot help wondering whether “Dib” was meant to refer to Dieblich, on the Moselle. If it did, the mountain on the right would be the Niederburg, and the two buildings on the mountain beyond would be the two castles of the Knights of Cobern. Turner passed along this part of the Moselle in 1834. But, as a famous commentator once said, I put forward this suggested emendation without much confidence in its correctness.
I can offer no suggestion as to the identity of the places represented in these sketches, except that _A Gorge_ may be one of the falls of the Reichenbach.
This is a strange drawing which I do not understand. The rainbow has only two colours, viz. yellow and crimson lake.
The latter sketch contains an entrancing play of colour and suggestion. What a fine foundation for the airy structure raised above it that band of rich darkness makes which runs straight across the centre of the design! I suppose it represents loose rocks in shadow. Above them a range of mountains, faintly touched with crimson, rises out of the pale blue mist, with an opalescent sky above; on the right a cluster of white roofs carries the eye to a narrow defile. The foreground is just as elusive as the distance and middle distance. There are streams flowing among the stones, but those touches of white, are they birds or foam? And is that a figure on the right almost lost in the shadow of the rocks? What a beautiful dream it all is! And I cannot help wondering what earthly place suggested the dream. It reminds me vaguely of the neighbourhood of Bellinzona. Somewhere north of Lugano I fancy the happy wanderer might chance at daybreak upon some such scene as Turner has suggested.
130. _Lake of Lucerne: Brunnen in the Distance_ (Plate XX).
There can be no doubt about the locality which furnished the motive of this lovely vision, though I believe some years ago the drawing was described as a “View on the Rhine.” There in the distance are the two Mythens; and there at the edge of the lake is Brunnen. The drawing must have been made at or near Treib, on the Lake of Lucerne.