Mêr de Glace, Valley of Chamouni-Savoy, part X, plate 50 from "Liber Studiorum"
Artist and publisher Joseph Mallord William Turner British
Not on view
Turner distilled his ideas about landscape In "Liber Studiorum" (Latin for Book of Studies), a series of seventy prints plus a frontispiece published between 1807 and 1819. To establish the compositions, he made brown watercolor drawings, then etched outlines onto copper plates. This is one of the few instances where Turner also developed the tone, here using mezzotint to detail an image of glacier developed from sketches made in Switzerland near the St. Gothard pass. Working experimentally, he rocked only part of the plate to create the darks, rather than following conventional mezzotint practice, where the plate is rocked completely, and highlights creates by scraping and burnishing. The "M" in the upper margin refers to Turner's category of Mountainous landscape.
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