James Pattison Cockburn Mont Blanc from the Road to Sallanches

An original 1816 watercolour painting, James Pattison Cockburn, Mont Blanc from the Road to Sallanches.

This splendid topographical landscape in sepia wash by James Pattison Cockburn (1779–1847) shows a view of Mont Blanc from the road to Sallanches in the Savoy Alps.

Sited in the valley below Mont Blanc, the area held special significance for travellers at the beginning of the 19th century. The town of Sallanches provided a halfway stop between Geneva and Chamonix and was popular with travellers in the 19th century who wished to take in the valley, in anticipation of the steep Mont Blanc ascent; a stop at Sallanches provided many with their first clear view of the sublime massif.

J.M.W. Turner and John Ruskin both sketched at Sallanches: Turner spending time in the area in the first decades of the 19th century (see, for example, Tate D04603), and Ruskin visiting repeatedly between the 1830s and 1880s.

James Pattison Cockburn was a military man and topographical artist—an army officer and watercolourist—who was taught drawing under Paul Sandby at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1793. Under Sandby's tutelage he learnt the skills required for topography, and this translated into an exacting drawing style, often in graphite, pen and brown ink, or sepia wash.

This drawing dates from a productive period following the end of the Napoleonic Wars when Cockburn could visit the Continent more frequently; in the period 1816–22 he produced a wealth of drawings in sepia of his travels in the Alps and elsewhere in Italy and Switzerland, whilst working for the English engraver and publisher William Bernard Cooke.

Provenance: William Drummond (Covent Garden Gallery, London)

In sepia wash with faint graphite underdrawing. On wove paper. Historically conservation mounted onto buff wove paper.