Drawn for Ruskin, who considered it 'on the whole the mightiest drawing of his final time', together with 'The Lake of Zug - early morning', executed for Munro (now Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The preliminary watercolour sketch is No.610; it has none of the brilliant red colouring of this more elaborate version. Ruskin wrote: 'He was very definitely in the habit of indicating the association of any subject with circumstances of death, especially the death of multitudes, by placing it under one of his most deeply crimsoned sunset skies ..... The sky of this Goldau is in its scarlet and crimson, the deepest in tone of all that I know in Turner's drawings.'