The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons

Turner never saw this happen. He was working in London, and the likely spark was news from Switzerland: in 1808 an avalanche at Selva, in the Grisons, had buried a cottage and killed 25 people. He exhibited the picture two years later. There is no heroic viewpoint here and no tiny awestruck traveller to steady the scene. A vast slab of rock is caught in the middle of falling, about to crush a cabin at the lower left, while snow and cloud tear across everything else. Turner was in his mid-thirties and already interested in weather as a force rather than a backdrop. The boulder, painted as a hard dark wedge against all that churning white, is the one still thing in a picture built entirely out of motion.