Alexandre Calame, 'The Lake of Thun', 1854

This is a view of Lake Thun, which is on the River Aare in the Bernese Oberland (Bernese Highlands), Switzerland. We are looking south from the northern shore of the lake. The sunlit snowy peak in the distance has been identified as the Blümlisalp, but it also has some resemblance to the Jungfrau.

Raised near Lake Geneva, Alexandre Calame knew the Swiss landscape well. Beginning in 1835, he regularly exhibited at the Paris Salon and soon became the leading Swiss landscape painter of his generation. Demand for his paintings was fuelled by the growing popularity of Switzerland, particularly the Alps, as a destination for tourists who especially valued the landscape’s restorative effects. Lake scenes were among Calame’s most popular works. He received a number of orders for views of Lake Thun, which he had visited from 1836 to 1852, although no sketches of the lake survive. This view of the lake was commissioned in 1852 by the British collector, Henry Vaughan (1809–1899), who owned important watercolours by Turner. He asked for ‘a picture with distant snows and trees of even, warm and misty colouration'.

This is a tranquil, even idyllic, lake scene. On the water, two fishermen in a boat gather their nets. A rocky inlet fills the foreground. A grassy bank and a group of trees take up much of the right-hand side. The slight browning of some of the foliage suggests it may be late summer or early autumn. Calame mostly used small precise brushstrokes to produce an extremely smooth picture surface that complements the calm water of the lake and the clarity of the light. The stillness of the water is further emphasised by the sharpness of the fishermen’s reflection and by the unbroken reflection of a white sail in the distance. Where brushstrokes are visible, they suggest just a hint of texture – for example, the leaves against the sky and the ripples of the water at the shoreline. Calame painted the natural world with an almost scientific precision. If you look closely, you can see how he shows different types of foliage and has even painted the cracks and tiny fissures on the mossy rocks.

The picture is divided into two complementary areas of colour. On the right, the palette is largely restricted to greens, browns and greys, although small highlights of other colours are also used – for example, the dots of blue for the glints of sky through the leaves. On the left, Calame mainly uses blues and whites together with a pinkish-beige for the mountains closest to the lake. The use of white creates an almost milky effect for the water. This complements the pearly hue of the light to achieve the ‘misty colouration’ specified in Vaughan’s commission.

Calame often received requests for pairs of pictures of contrasting subjects – for example, a peaceful lake might be paired with a waterfall or storm. His slightly later painting, At Handeck, which shows a solitary tall pine set high above a deep valley as a storm looms, is an example of a more dramatic view. Vaughan only commissioned this one painting from Calame.