Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen

In 1802 there was a short break in the long war with France, the Peace of Amiens, and for about a year British travellers could cross to the continent again. Turner, then in his twenties, went straight for the Alps and came home with more than 400 drawings. Within months the war was back on and that door shut for years, so those sketches became a store he mined for decades. This is one of the paintings he built from them, worked up around 1805, of the great falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen. He was less interested in an exact likeness of the place than in the sheer weight of the water. He pressed and flattened the paint with a palette knife until the spray looks nearly as solid as the rock it pours over. Down in the corner a mother pulls her child clear of two fighting cart horses, the one flash of human panic in a picture otherwise given wholly to the falling water.