Anges musiciens (Angel Musicians) The 1930s saw Louis Soutter produce thirty or so drawings in dialogue with the classical repertoire, particularly the Italian schools of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. They are not so much traditional copies after the…
Nature morte au plat de fruits (Still life with a dish of fruit) At the age of eighteen, Henri Manguin struck up a friendship with two fellow fine art students, Albert Marquet and Henri Matisse. The trio was joined by Charles Camoin, Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain and…
La Dispute religieuse de Lausanne (The Lausanne Disputation) The lands now known as the Vaud belonged to the House of Savoy and the Lausanne bishopric until they were annexed by Bern early in 1536. The region’s new masters set out to rally the…
Sapho se précipitant dans la mer (Sappho throwing herself in the sea) Laura B. Goeldlin de Tiefenau was born in the United States and studied painting and sculpting in Santa Barbara, California. When she moved to Switzerland in 1928, her sculptures took a symbolic, mystical turn: she…
Pigeon boulant (Pouter Pigeon) Pierre Blanc moved to Paris in October 1925. Though still a young man, he had already been part of the team working on the sculpted decor in the Federal Supreme Court in Lausanne. In Paris,…
L’américaine doit être plus grande… (The American woman must be bigger…) Louis Soutter studied fine art in Geneva and Paris before setting out for New York, where he planned to set up an art and interior design studio. He eventually settled in Colorado Springs and married…
Offrande à Hymen (Offering to Hymen) François Sablet, older brother of the better-known Jacques, travelled to Paris in 1768 to complete his studies in the studio of Joseph-Marie Vien. He built a financially successful career in the circle round the artist…
Forêt en Île-de-France (Sous-bois) (Forest in Ile-de-France, undergrowth) While Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso left Cubism behind and moved on to a “new synthesis”, André Derain turned increasingly to a restrictive form of archaism. The prosaic subjects, lack of imagination in the composition,…
Portrait de Nathalie Biéler, sœur de l’artiste (Portrait of the artist’s sister Nathalie Biéler) Ernest Biéler moved from his native Switzerland to Paris in 1880 to study at the Atelier suisse, the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian. In 1884, he visited an exhibition in memory of Édouard…
Première messe en Kabylie (First mass in Kabylia) Horace Vernet first travelled to Algeria following the French army on its conquest of North Africa. His first of many visits to the country came in 1833. Vernet was a devout Catholic in the pay…