Glacier of Rosenlaui

Glacier of Rosenlaui was painted in 1856 when John Brett was twenty-three and had just encountered the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's insistence on direct, unmediated observation of nature. The Rosenlaui glacier in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland had attracted painters and tourists since the early nineteenth century, but Brett's version is unusual in its extreme fidelity to the specific geological character of the ice — crevasses, moraine, and the blue-green translucency of glacial ice are rendered with scientific exactness rather than sublime vagueness. John Ruskin, who would become Brett's demanding mentor, praised the painting for its geological accuracy. The National Gallery holds the canvas as an example of Pre-Raphaelite landscape's insistence on truth to nature extended to geological as well as botanical subjects.

Brett uses a near-vertical compositional arrangement that places the glacier's face as the dominant element, minimising sky and foreground. The blue-green tones of the ice are built up in layers to suggest the characteristic translucency of glacial ice. Rock and moraine in the foreground are painted with individual attention to the character of different stone types.