Exhibited with the following lines, which anticipate those attributed by Turner to his Fallacies of Hope, first quoted in connection with ‘Hannibal crossing the Alps':

The downward sun a parting sadness gleams,

Portenteous lurid thro' the gathering storm;

Thick drifting snow, on snow,

Till the vast weight bursts thro' the rocky barrier;

Down at once, its pine clad forests,

And towering glaciers fall, the work of ages

Crashing through all! extinction follows,

And the toil, the hope of man - o'erwhelms.

As Jack Lindsay has pointed out (1966, p. I07) these verses and the reference to the Grisons recall a passage from ‘Winter', one of Thomson's Seasons, and Turner was probably also inspired by two paintings of avalanches by de Loutherbourg in the collections of his patrons, one, of c.1800, in the collection of Lord Egremont (still at Petworth; repr. illustrated souvenir The First Hundred Years of the Royal Academy, Royal Academy 1951-2, p.53), the other, dated 1803, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1804 and sold to Sir John Leicester in 1805 (now Tate Gallery; see The Tate Gallery Report 1965-66, pp. 19-20, repr.). However, as Ruskin noted in his Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House 1856, 'No one ever before had conceived a stone in flight'; de Loutherbourg's pictures and the verses of Thomson deal only with the power of falling snow. The crucial forms in the picture coincide with the main lines of the composition and the picture is given extra force by the extreme boldness of Turner's use of the palette knife. A contemporary review of Turner's gallery in The Sun for 12 June 1810 noted that the picture 'is not in his usual style, but is not less excellent’.