This dramatic picture, shown at the Royal Academy in 1916, is of the Valley of Lauterbrunnen (‘loud waters’) in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, a place suffused with myth and ancient lore, which inspired generations of artists. The cliffs rise over 200m and over 60 waterfalls cascade over them from such a height that they disperse into mist before they hit the ground. It is morning, and the sun is in the east, casting deep shadows into the depths below. The Staubbachfall and the Spissbachfall are prominent on the east side of the valley, and the view is from a stop on the Wengernalp cog railway, the locomotives of which wind themselves over the west cliffs just above the village of Wengen, behind you, and opposite the village of Mürren on the east cliffs. The Breithorn is the highest mountain in the background, with the Tschingelhorn behind clouds on the right. A visit to the Staubbachfall in October of 1779 inspired Goethe to write his poem Gesang der Geister über den Wassern (‘Song of the Spirits over the Waters’), which compares the mystical journey of the soul to the cycle of water. In the particularly freezing winter of 1816 (the ‘Year without a Summer’ exactly 100 years before our painting was exhibited at the RA in the darkest year of the First World War), Byron, accompanied by his personal physician John William Polidori, was staying at the Villa Deodati on Lake Geneva with Percy and Mary Shelley. Their famous ghost-story sessions gave rise to two Gothic literary landmarks, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre, and Byron’s tour that same year up the Lauterbrunnen valley inspired his dramatic poem Manfred. Staying at Wengen, Byron noted in his Alpine Journal, 1816: ‘[A] range of scenes beyond all description, or previous conception … the clouds rose from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring tide.’

Purchased from the Royal Academy 1916, in the purchaser's family until 2003;
Christie's London, September 2007, lot 262;
Peter Nahum at Leicester Galleries, c. 2006;
Bemberg Collection