Bring your favorites together in your free personal gallery.
Your galleryValley of Aosta
Look first
- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
Show me
Find the tiny figures near the lower right, then trace the enormous pale sweep descending through the mountains above them.
Turner gives the storm far more room than the people beneath it. Snow, cloud, and mountains become difficult to separate as pale and dark passages curve across the canvas. The small foreground figures establish a human scale against which the weather feels overwhelming, even before each part of the landscape becomes clear.
Oil on canvas · 92.2 × 123 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Romanticism
Look again
What do you notice now?
Try a quick sketch
Take a minute to sketch on any paper. No upload needed.
What did you draw first? What did you leave out?
Details and source
- Museum title
- Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche, and Thunderstorm
- Artist
- J. M. W. Turner
- Date
- 1836–37
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 92.2 × 123 cm (36 1/4 × 48 in.); Framed: 116.9 × 147.4 × 11.8 cm (46 × 58 × 4 5/8 in.)
- Credit line
- Frederick T. Haskell Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.