Sonnenuntergang vom Gipfel der Rigi

Turner went back to Switzerland in 1844, the last of his long journeys there, and stayed at Lucerne with the Rigi standing across the water. The mountain was already a tourist fixture. Visitors rode up by mule in the dark to be on the summit for sunrise, then came down and wrote about it. Turner watched the Rigi from the far shore at every hour of the day, and the watercolours he is remembered for were made from exactly that spot.

This canvas puts you on top of it instead, looking out at the sun going down, at a view from a summit he seems never to have climbed.

He never exhibited it. It was still in his studio when he died in 1851, and it came to the nation with everything else that was there, some 300 oil paintings, as part of the Turner Bequest.