Falls of Schaffhausen (Val d’Aosta)

Falls of Schaffhausen, dated around 1845, shows one of Europe's most powerful waterfalls — the Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen in northern Switzerland — in Turner's late atmospheric manner. He had first seen the Rhine Falls in 1802 and was overwhelmed by their scale and violence: the full width of the Rhine dropping nearly twenty-three metres over a broad rock ledge, the noise audible from miles away, the spray creating perpetual rainbows in morning sun. He produced watercolours of the falls on that first visit and returned to the subject repeatedly across his career. The 1845 treatment belongs to his final group of Swiss subjects, when he was applying his most advanced atmospheric technique to Alpine subjects he had first encountered over forty years earlier. Where earlier depictions had captured the physical drama of the falls through contrasts of dark rock and white water, the late version dissolves the cataract into a luminous atmospheric event in which water and spray and light become indistinguishable.

Turner renders the waterfall's immense power through atmospheric effects of spray and mist, using the waterfall's kinetic energy to create a dynamic composition of natural force.