Panthère (Panther) André Lasserre began his career in Paris as a student of Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière before moving to Lausanne in 1951 and turning to constructivist abstraction. While in Paris in…
Maquette pour le rideau de scène de L’Histoire du Soldat (Scale model stage curtain for The Soldier’s Tale) In 1916, as the First World War was raging, Pablo Picasso designed a stage curtain for Parade. The show with texts by Jean Cocteau and music by Erik Satie, premiered in Paris in 1917 by…
Femme nue lutinant un Silène (Nude woman fondling a Silenus) As Félix Vallotton left his Nabi period behind, he began to move on to larger formats, producing a series of canvases featuring bathing women, allegories, and scenes from mythology. Even on the larger scale, his…
Le Rêve (The Dream) This poster for a ballet at the Académie nationale de musique in Paris is typical of the craze for all things Japanese in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Japan became fashionable following the…
Septima hora The painting’s warm, velvety, almost acid hues and thick, matte paintwork make it almost glow. It dates from a period when Maurice Denis was moving on from his Nabi period to embrace a new classicism.
Allégorie (Allegory) Allégorie is the opening lithography in Amour, an illustrated book commissioned by the publisher and art dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1892. When it was eventually published in 1899, it contained thirteen compositions – twelve plates…
Buste de Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (Bust of Charles Ferdinand Ramuz) Otto Charles Bänninger studied sculpture with Franz Wanger in Zurich before moving to Paris in 1920 to join Émile-Antoine Bourdelle’s studio at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. The following year, he joined Bourdelle’s personal…
Le Terrassier (The Road builder) Aimé-Jules Dalou, a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and contemporary of Auguste Rodin, was a major French sculptor in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He turned his back on the idealised style adopted by…
Le remorqueur (The Tug) September 24, 1859. The Lake Geneva tugboat operating company launches the Mercure in Morges harbour as a crowd of onlookers claps and cheers. The steamship, designed by the famous Zurich-based shipbuilders Escher, Wyss & Cie,…
Le tombeau de Plautius sur la route de Tivoli (The tomb of Plautius on the road to Tivoli) François Keiserman arrived in Rome in 1789, financed by the Vaud-based art entrepreneur Louis Ducros who had hired him as a watercolourist at his rapidly expanding engraving studio. Keiserman soon specialised in veduti, or topographical…