Lucerne: Moonlight

Lucerne: Moonlight from 1843 belongs to Turner's late Swiss series, produced after his final Swiss tour of that year when he was sixty-eight years old and still making the arduous Alpine journey in pursuit of the extreme atmospheric effects that Switzerland uniquely provided. Lake Lucerne, surrounded by the Alps and the pre-Alpine hills of central Switzerland, offered a combination of still water and mountain drama that Turner had been painting since his first Swiss visit in 1802. His late Lucerne moonlight paintings represent the culmination of forty years of lunar observation — he had studied moonlight on water from the Thames to the Venetian lagoon — now applied to the most sublime setting he had access to. The nocturnal subject was less common in his work than dawn or sunset, and the challenge of rendering moonlight's cold, reflective quality through oil pigment required solutions quite different from his warm solar effects: pale, silver-grey washes, the lake surface a cool mirror rather than a warm one. Whistler would later achieve comparable nocturnal effects in his Thames paintings, acknowledging Turner's moonlight studies as a precedent.

Turner renders the moonlit scene with subtle luminosity, using reflected light on the lake and the ethereal glow of moonlight to create a nocturnal composition of remarkable delicacy.