Drawn and engraved in mezzotint by Turner. Etching attributed to Dawe (see Ruskin's view of plates not etched by Turner). Dated 1816 and published in Part 12 of the Liber Studiorum ( Finberg 60). Category: Mountainous. (See Forrester, p.122.)
Part of the foreground is reproduced in Modern Painters IV (1856) to illustrate good stone drawing ( Works, 6.373). In his Notes on the Turner Gallery (1857) Ruskin includes this plate in a list of the 'best of the series' ( Works, 13.96). In The Elements of Drawing (1857), he recommends study of it as one of the 'most desirable' Liber Studiorum subjects ( Works, 15.98) and describes the clouds as 'among the best of Turner 's storm studies ( Works, 15.131). In Modern Painters V (1860) he draws attention to Turner's method of 'relating the glacier's history' by depicting the distortion and obliqueness of the pines ( Works, 7.105). An impression was included in the Oxford Rudimentary Series, in the catalogue of which (1878) Ruskin comments that it was 'engraved by Turner himself with extremest care' ( Works, 21.222). It was one of six 'great plates' of the Liber which Ruskin included in the 1878 exhibition of works from his own collection ( Works, 13.462), but he draws attention to Turner's evasion of the need to represent pines 'in their multitudes', the artist being satisfied with 'mere conventional zigzags' instead ( Works, 13.513).