Le Nouveau-né (The Newborn) Albert Anker’s charming painting of a family welcoming a new baby dates from the year his own son Ruedi was born. The tightly framed composition draws on the contrast between the white bedding in the…
La bibliothèque (The Bookcase) This painting of a woman choosing a book from a shelf is a far cry from Félix Vallotton’s Nabi interiors featuring the everyday triumphs and tragedies of bourgeois households. It is also very different from…
L’ Adieu à la vie ou Le Baiser (Farewell to life or The Kiss) After fighting in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, Albert Bartholomé left the army and moved to Geneva to study art with Barthélémy Menn. By 1874, he was regularly returning to Paris, moving back permanently in…
Florence Bartholomé, les yeux clos (Florence Bartholomé, eyes closed) Albert Bartholomé’s second wife, née Florence Letessier, proved a fresh source of artistic inspiration, sparking a new vision of womanhood that married the expression of calm, luminous beauty with a realistic depiction of womanly features.
Bex Félix Vallotton began spending most of the year in Paris in the 1880s. He would return to Switzerland in the summer months, bringing small pieces of wood or cardboard and paints to the shores of…
Vue du lac Léman et des Alpes (View of Lake Geneva and the Alps) The renowned architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc painted this watercolour the year he died, while he was working on the renovation of Lausanne cathedral. The lower half shows the Vaud-side shore of Lake Geneva in its natural…
Bestie da soma (Beasts of burden) In April 1895, Giovanni Giacometti was working on an ambitious painting he planned to show at the fourth national exhibition in Geneva the following year. As he explained in a letter to his friend and…
Beau temps orageux (Fine Stormy Weather) At the dawn of the twentieth century, Provence and the Côte d’Azur proved a testing ground for modern art. Vincent Van Gogh described the region as the ‘great studio of southern France’, where artists came…
Le génie de Ludwig van Beethoven (The Spirit of Ludwig van Beethoven) Beethoven was honoured as a quasi-divine figure as early as the ceremonies held to mark his funeral in 1827. For the Romantic generation, his extraordinarily fecund talent symbolised poetic inspiration and his deafness the solitude…
Paysage du Midi (Landscape, Southern France) Auguste Renoir first saw Provence on his way back from a tour of Algeria and Italy in 1881-1882. He visited Paul Cézanne in the port of L’Estaque, which takes its name from the range of…