Kunstmuseum Lucerne opens 'Turner: The Sea and the Alps'

The British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) travelled through Switzerland in search of spectacular motifs. During his travels he visited Lucerne several times in order to study the unique local interplay of light and weather conditions, lake and mountains. The artist first visited Central Switzerland in the year 1802, when tens of thousands of British travellers availed themselves of the brief period of the Peace of Amiens to go on the continent. The impressions of the sea and Alps were of major importance for Turner: here the beauty and the threat of nature culminated to typify the major theme of the sublime, which was central to Romanticism. With the advent of Romanticism, the Alps were no longer just an impediment on the way to the South, but a destination in themselves. At the same time they became a theme in art. Turner filled several sketchbooks with impressions of the rugged mountains. The depictions of the Schöllenenschlucht and the Mer de Glace testify t