Aloïse (Aloïse Corbaz, dite) La Couronne Impériale de la terre royale. Cahier Pâques 1943 (The Imperial Crown of the Royal Land. Easter sketchpad 1943), 1943 Aloïse was fifty-seven and in her twenty-third year as a patient at the Gimel asylum when she filled the twenty pages of this sketchpad with…
Ferdinand Hodler Portrait du Dr Louis Bourget, 1889 Hodler’s particular interest in the portrait towards the end of the 1880s is reflected in the idea of a course on the subject that he…
Marc Louis Benjamin Vautier (L'Aîné) Une vente aux enchères dans l'Oberland bernois (An Auction in the Bernese Oberland), 1856 The shift from a predominantly rural to an industrial society from the 1830s on led to the emergence of an ethnographic school of painting whose…
Félix Vallotton Le château Gaillard (Château Gaillard), 1924 In 1924, when travelling to Honfleur, where he rented a villa for the summer in 1909, Félix Vallotton stopped at Les Andelys, a village on…
René Auberjonois Autoportrait (Self-Portrait), 1929 René Auberjonois frequently tried his hand at self-portraits. He was familiar with the difficulties of the exercise. As he wrote in 1916, ‘It is a…
On display Alexandre Calame Le lac de Brienz (Lake Brienz), 1843 Alexandre Calame’s talent was first spotted in 1829 by the banker Jacques-Amédée Diodati, who paid for him to study with François Diday, the master of…
On display Ernest Biéler Devant l’église de Saint-Germain à Savièse (Outside the Church of Saint-Germain in Savièse), 1886 Born in the Canton of Vaud, Ernest Biéler moved to Paris in the early 1880s but continued to live in Switzerland from time to time.…
Albert Marquet Samois, l’île (Samois, Island), 1917 Albert Marquet spend August and September 1917 living by the Seine in Samois, a village about forty miles south-east of Paris. Once he had found…
Albert Marquet Grimstad, Norvège (Grimstad, Norway), 1925 Albert Marquet's art betrays a lifelong, near-obsessive fascination with water. He took little interest in sites of outstanding beauty or remarkable views. The scenes he…
On display François Bocion Lac et pêcheurs (Lake and Fishermen), 1885 François Bocion spent most of his life by Lake Geneva, exploring its shoreline in both Switzerland and France. Many works painted in Yvoire, Évian and…
On display Giovanni Giacometti Maloja en hiver or Piz Lagrev (Maloja in Winter or Piz Lagrev), 1929 When Ferdinand Hodler died in 1918, Giovanni Giacometti became one of the leading figures on the Swiss German art scene, rivalled only by with Cuno…
Aristide Maillol Torse de l'Île-de-France (Torso of the Ìle-de-France), 1922 Aristide Maillol studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before turning to sculpture in 1895. His early works were influenced by Art Nouveau;…
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen Trottin sous la pluie (Delivery Girl in the Rain), 1898 The four thousand or so works in Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s print oeuvre made use of all the mechanical and photomechanical reproduction techniques available to him at…
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen Guerre à la guerre (War at War), between 1916 and 1920 This drawing poignantly reworks two pieces of art that were a lifelong inspiration for Steinlen: the painting La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People)…
Eugène Grasset Apparition d’un visage nimbé dans le ciel au-dessus de Paris (Appearance of a Haloed Face in the Sky over Paris), 1898 This painting is one of a number of subjects imagined by Eugène Grasset that explains the interest idealists took in his work from the early…
Louis Soutter Amants. Aurons-nous? un logis d’hiver (Lovers. Will We Have? A Winter Abode), between 1937 and 1942 Louis Soutter captures images in movement, freezing them for all eternity. A constant flux of black silhouettes, doomed to eternal rootlessness, are forced to keep…
Félix Vallotton Le port de Rouen (The Port of Rouen), 1901 At the turn of the twentieth century, Rouen was one of France’s busiest river ports and a popular destination for painters. Camille Pissarro visited its…
Félix Vallotton Ruisseau rouille et galets blancs (Rust Stream and White Pebbles), 1921 A painful case of sciatica that came on in 1916 prompted Félix Vallotton to decide in late autumn 1920 to spend the winter season in…
On display Charles Giron Jeune femme au piano (Young Woman at the Piano) or Portrait de Mlle Maguie D. (Portrait of Mlle Maguie D.), 1880 For the Swiss, Charles Giron’s most emblematic work is undoubtedly Le berceau de la Confédération (The Cradle of the Confederation, 1901), a gigantic Alpine landscape…
Félix Vallotton L’âge du papier. Dessin pour Le Cri de Paris (The Age of Paper. Drawing for Le Cri de Paris), 1898 Félix Vallotton rose to fame in the 1890s with his woodblock engravings and his illustrations for the rapidly growing press industry. Having moved from Switzerland…
On display Gustave Buchet L’Esprit nouveau (The New Spirit), 1925/8 The titles of the opening chapters of Après le cubisme (After Cubism) [1918] reflect the questions of Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (better known as…
Paul Klee Am Nil (On the Nile), 1939 Paul Klee spent four weeks travelling across Egypt, from Alexandria to Cairo and from Luxor to Aswan, from 17 December 1928 to 17 January 1929.…
On display Giovanni Giacometti Alberto che legge (Alberto Reading), c. 1915 This portrait shows the home in Stampa where Giovanni Giacometti spent the last four decades of his life. By the time Alberto, the first of…
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen Les échappés de l’enfer II (Survivors of Hell), 1917 Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen was fifty-five years old when Germany declared war on France on 3 August 1914, ushering in the twentieth century’s litany of horrors. The…
Niklaus Stoecklin Portrait de Tatjana Barbakoff (Portrait of Tatjana Barbakoff), 1929 In 1925, both the Swiss artist Niklaus Stoecklin and his Latvian subject Tatjana Barbakoff began their rise to international fame. Stoecklin was the only non-German…
Hendrik Voogd Campagne romaine sous un ciel d’orage (Roman Countryside under a Stormy Sky), c. 1800 Born in Amsterdam and trained at the city’s municipal art school, Hendrik Voogd spent all his career in Rome, where he settled at the age…
Alice Bailly Jeu d'éventail (Playing with a Fan) or Femme à l'éventail (Woman with a Fan), 1913 Alice Bailly studied in Geneva before moving to Paris in 1906, where she became an admirer of fauvism. Her work already showed signs of the…
