Füelen, from the Lake of Lucerne

The village of Füelen hugs the shore of the Lake of Lucerne beneath sheer mountains, a steamer trailing smoke across the water. J.M.W. Turner drew the Swiss subject in 1845, late in a career in which he returned obsessively to the Alps, and he finished the sheet in watercolor and gouache for a projected series of engraved views of Switzerland. Its radiant bands of sky, lake and mountain, built up in luminous washes that seem to glow from within, are a distillation of his lifelong study of light, made in the final decade of his life.