Chateau de St. Michael, Bonneville, Savoy

Britain and France stopped fighting in March 1802, and for about a year English travellers could cross the Channel again. Turner was 27 and had just been made a full Academician. He sailed in July, went up into Savoy and Switzerland with his sketchbooks, and came home in October through Paris, where he spent days in the Louvre among the pictures Napoleon's armies had brought back from Italy, taking notes on Poussin. He worked this view up over the winter and hung it at the Royal Academy in 1803 with a second Alpine subject, and the critics liked both. The title he gave it mixes French and English and misspells both. That exhibition was still open when the two countries went back to war in May, which shut the road he had taken.