Visions of Reichenbach

Every January the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin where I live exhibits its collection of thirty-one watercolours and drawings by the artist, JMW Turner. The English collector, Henry Vaughan, bequeathed the paintings in 1900 on condition that they only be shown in January when the light is weakest to protect them.

The tradition continues even though the print gallery where they are on display is only lit now by dim artificial light.

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Among the wonderful works shown is one of Turner’s several watercolours of the Reichenbach Falls, which the artist visited in the first decade of the nineteenth century. I can’t help wondering if Sidney Paget ever saw Turner’s work, other versions of which are held in the Tate Gallery in London, when drawing up his own splendid image. [Turner’s watercolour, right, Paget’s version below]

But what exactly inspired Conan Doyle to make this dramatic landscape the scene of Holmes’ and Moriarty’s struggle to the death as recounted in The Final Problem? It is of course well known that by the time Conan Doyle travelled to Switzerland in 1893, he was heartily sick of his creation and planned, against his mother’s wishes, to finish him off.

There are various versions of how he came to fix on the Falls as the scene of Holmes’ demise (though of course, as with Mark Twain, rumours of Holmes’ death turned out to have been greatly exaggerated). In one account by Henry Lunn, a former missionary who was later to set up Lunn’s Travels, it was while in Switzerland with another friend, the Reverend Dawson, that Conan Doyle told them, ‘I have made up my mind to kill Sherlock Holmes; he is becoming such a burden to me that it makes my life unbearable.’ Lunn continued, ‘It was the Reverend W J Dawson who suggested the spot, the Reichenbach Falls near Meiringen where Conan Doyle finished the great detective, so I was an accessory before the fact.’

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Dawson himself admitted his involvement, stating in a magazine article that ‘it is a tribute to Dr Doyle’s sense of artistic fitness that he finally selected this spot for the tragedy. The water pours over a curving precipice into a huge cauldron, from whose black depth rises a cloud of vapour, through which the morning sun flashes innumerable rainbows. The eye vainly searches the abyss for any bottom; the depth seems infinite, and the thunder that rises from the boiling cauldron is terrific.’

Another more flippant version has Silas Hocking, another popular author of the day on another hike, telling Conan Doyle, perhaps a trifle impatiently, ‘If you are determined on making an end of Holmes, why not bring him out to Switzerland and drop him down a crevasse. It would save on funeral expenses.’

Whatever the truth of the matter, over he went (apparently), clutching on to Moriarty, only to reappear several years later when the author responded to cries from fans and to offers he could not possibly refuse, explaining the detective’s survival in as perfunctory way as that of Bobby in Dallas.

But if you happen to be in the vicinity, please visit Dublin’s National Gallery and wallow in the glory that is Turner’s depiction of the Falls before the painting is stashed away until next January.

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