Alexandre Calame
(Vevey 1810 - 1864 Menton)

Mountain Valley, 1836

Oil on paper laid down on canvas
19 x 24 cm

Inscribed on the stretcher Calame 1836

Literature: Valentina Anker, Alexandre Calame. Vie et oeuvre: Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Fribourg 1987, p. 348 f, no. 156 (repr.)

Provenance: Private collection, Switzerland

This early oil sketch by Alexandre Calame was executed on a visit to the Bernese Oberland. He first visited this part of the Alps in 1835 and was to spend almost all his summers in the area, regularly revisiting the same sites.

Valentina Anker, the author of the catalogue raisonné of Calame's paintings, ascribes the sketch - on compositional and stylistic grounds - to a group of mountain landscapes executed in the Bernese Oberland in the period 1836 to 1843. The newly-discovered presence of the inscription 1836 on the verso corrects Anker's earlier, purely stylistically-based dating of 1840-3 [1].

Calame's early landscapes brought him considerable acclaim [2]. His first taste of international recognition came at the Paris Salon in 1839 with his painting Storm near Handeck[3]. His Geneva studio rapidly began to attract collectors and visitors from all over Europe. The Russian Tsars acquired several works. The French King, Louis Philippe, was the buyer of the painting exhibited by Calame at the 1841 Paris Salon [4].

The present oil sketch was executed en plein-air. This is evidenced by the choice of paper as a medium, the work's small format and the extraordinary fluidity of its brushwork. It sensitively evokes the atmospheric effects of a high mountain region while capturing the characteristics of the vegetation and rock formations with extreme attention to detail. The influence of Calame's study trip to Holland in the late 1830s and his deep assimilation of the work of Jacob von Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema on that trip is apparent in the skilful handling of the chosen format and the use of subtle perspectival gradations [5].

Calame began his career as an employee of a banker named Diodati. It was Diodati who enabled him to take up painting in 1829, financing his studies under the landscape painter François Diday. Calame spent free moments colouring Swiss views which he sold to tourists.

He began to exhibit regularly in Geneva, Berlin and Leipzig in 1835 and after 1839 was a regular contributor to the Paris Salon. Public recognition was widespread, particularly in France and Germany. He travelled widely in France, Germany and Holland constantly searching for new motifs. He visited Rome and Naples in 1844, where he was in contact with and influenced by the international community of artists living and working in the two cities. In 1855, failing health compelled him to restrict his travels to regions north of the Alps.

In the 1840s, Calame was ranked as one of Switzerland's leading landscape painters in the company of such names as his teacher François Diday and Wolfgang-Adam Töpffer.

He received numerous awards during his lifetime but after his death in 1864, recognition of his work experienced something of a decline. However, today he is regarded as one of the major representatives of the Swiss Romantic heroic tradition in landscape and alpine painting [6].

1) Anker, op. cit., p. 348: The V-shaped, slightly asymmetrical composition of this sketch situates it within the later phase of style 2 [‘La composition en V, légèrement asymétrique, de cette pochade, la situe vers la fin du style 2'].
2) Anker, op. cit., no. 68, Vue prise à la Handeck, 1836, purchased by the government of the canton of Bern in 1840, now held at the Kunstmuseum Bern.
3) Sturm bei Handeck, 1839, oil on canvas, 190 x 260 cm, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva (inv. no. 1839.1).
4) See Albero de André, Alpine Views. Alexandre Calame and the Swiss Landscape, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown 2006, p. 23.
5) Albero de André, op. cit., p. 23.
6) An exhibition of works from the private collection of Asbjorn Lunde was staged at the National Gallery in London in 2011. It featured a large group of paintings by Calame shown in juxtaposition to works by major Northern European painters. This context testifies to Calame's signal importance in early 19th-century European landscape painting. See Forests, Rocks, Torrents; Norwegian and Swiss Landscape Paintings from the Lunde Collection, exhib. cat., London, National Gallery, 2011.