This is a view from high up on Montanvert looking down into the Chamonix valley and onto the Glacier du Bois and the source of the River Arveyron, with the Aiguilles Rouges behind. These mountains are shown in hazy blue afternoon light. Towne’s sketch of the Chapeau (FT338), drawn on 16 September, looks towards the same mountains, but in the morning. Other drawings that can be identified with this same day’s work are FT337, FT383, and FT386. Many eighteenth-century visitors climbed Montanvert in order to see the famous Mer de Glace (FT383); typically they travelled on mules for the first hour, before walking for one and a half to two hours more, stopping “frequently to repose and refresh ourselves . . . and to contemplate the rude scenery of the mountains and the vale of Chamouny, through which the shoaly river Arve rimples along”.¹ No doubt this watercolour was sketched on one such stop, near the point when the visitors descended their mules and continued their ascent on foot.

This viewpoint was less common than the ground-level representation of the V&A work (FT340), although not entirely unknown. For instance, Turner’s two views of the source use Towne’s viewpoints—such as in this case in his Royal Academy exhibit of 1803 (Yale Center for British Art).

In both of Towne’s views of the source of the Arveyron, the landscape is defined very precisely, which is a sign that they were worked up long after the 1781 visit, although the many fingerprints on this drawing suggest that colouring was not wholly late in date. The much looser colouring of the Chapeau (FT338) was surely executed in or about 1781, and no doubt the work catalogued here was also given some colour about the same time.

As the long list of exhibitions dating from the first half of the twentieth century suggests, this drawing was the foremost example of the “modernist” presentation of Towne that was put forward by Oppé.