Alexandre Calame 1810–1864
NG 6660 
At Handeck

Sarah Herring, 2019

Extracted from:
Sarah Herring, The Nineteenth Century French Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2019).

c. 1860

Oil on canvas, 38.7 × 24.3 cm

Support

The canvas is very fine. The stretcher is irregularly shaped, and the height differs from 38.5 cm at the left to 38.7 cm at the right. The priming continues onto the entirety of the upper, lower and right‐hand tacking edges, but not the left edge, suggesting that it was cut from the left‐hand side of a larger, commercially primed piece. It seems likely that the canvas was pinned to a board during painting (there is a small pinhole at the bottom right corner), and only attached to the stretcher at a later point, certainly after the painting was completed. The stretcher has been crudely enlarged, but is still slightly small for the painting (the lower edge of the image has been lost from view, folded over the edge of the stretcher). In addition, the canvas is not completely square on the stretcher, and the tacks which have been used to secure it are unevenly spaced, and of a variety of types, indicating that this was not a professional job. It was perhaps stretched for Calame’s sale in 1865.

The red wax seal of the Calame sale is on the upper stretcher bar. The number from the sale, ‘351’, is written in pencil, along with the title, ‘Le Handeck’. ‘HB’ is written in marker pen and the number ‘24’ is written on a red sticker.

Materials and Technique

The canvas has been prepared with an off‐white priming consisting of lead white and chalk tinted with a little red and yellow earth. The darkest green paint from the foliage at the bottom left corner was painted with a mixture of Prussian blue and Indian yellow with bone black, lead white and some red and yellow earth. This area also features an irregular, thin underlayer of a murky green‐brown colour, consisting of red and yellow earth, bone black and possibly cobalt blue. The palest green paint present, for example on the mountain in the upper right corner, was painted with a mixture of French ultramarine and Indian yellow with some lead white and red earth.

A very thin brown ébauche is visible on the rock at the far left, overlaid with a thicker grey paint. Most of the landscape is painted in delicate touches of the brush using soft shades of greens and browns. On the right, Calame has laid on a dark green layer in thin, medium‐rich translucent paint, subsequently wiping off the excess and exposing the canvas weave. This rubbed‐off medium‐rich paint is also present in the mountain on the left. The white of the water is painted with slight impasto. Calame’s graphic treatment of the striations in the rocky slopes of the mountains, again painted with an extremely delicate brush, is typical of his work. The firs are painted in one tone of green. The foreground is also painted in one solid tone of grass green. The main tree and the firs to its left are painted with crystalline clarity. The foliage of the principal tree is rendered with extraordinary precision in dark‐green paint, overlaid with a lighter green (applied with a slightly broader brush) in the branches closer to the viewer. This same lighter green is used in the firs to the left.

Analysis of the light green paint of the foliage and the white paint used in the sky indicated the use of heat‐bodied poppy seed oil. The green paint also contained some larch resin, possibly an addition to the paint by the artist rather than the paint manufacturer. The dark green paint of the foliage and the white ground layer were, on the other hand, bound in heat‐bodied linseed oil.

Conservation and Condition

The painting is unlined and has never been removed from its original stretcher. The stretcher has a wooden strip added at the left edge, which is slightly raised, causing some slight cracking in the painting, but the paint is not loose (nor is there any loose paint in the slightly raised paint in the clouds in the upper left corner). There are some small restorations in the trees and clouds at the upper left edge, and in the mountain at the centre of the right edge. These retouchings probably cover small abrasions. The small pinhole in the bottom right corner, probably original, has also been retouched. The varnish is slightly discoloured.

Discussion

Positioned just to the left of centre, a lone alpine pine (Arolla pine) appears to stand aside to offer the spectator a breathtaking view of the valley dropping away. A river flows along the valley floor, the vegetation is lush and green, there is a cluster of small huts and the slope directly in front of them is dominated by fir trees. On either side of the valley loom massive, rocky cliffs. The land rises in the middle ground, with the river flowing through gentle grassy slopes, and further back it sweeps upward quite dramatically, ending in a backdrop of mountains, with a distinctive pyramid‐shaped peak at the left. The rock faces are punctuated by three waterfalls, at centre, right and left, and a river is formed which, a little further forward, appears to become another waterfall between two rocks forming a narrow pass, with the cliff on the right partly obscuring the flow of water.

For the artist’s sale this view was identified as Handeck, a hamlet in the Haslital valley in the Bernese Alps. The river is the Aare, which rises west of the Grimsel Pass in the upper and lower Aare glaciers, and flows north‐west through the valley. Just before the village of Guttannen, the river, together with the Ärlenbach, forms the Handeck Falls, for which the site is famous.

Calame’s views Views of Handeck

The Bernese Alps were Calame’s earliest encounter with the high mountains.¹ In the summer of 1835 he made his first journey to the Bernese Oberland, during which he visited Thun, Interlaken, Lauterbrunnen, Meringen and Handeck. He returned in the following year and again in 1838, and made many repeat visits until the 1860s. In 1851 he spent [page 60] the month of August at Handeck, staying in the chalet of one ‘Papa Zippach’ in the company of artist Charles Humbert (1813–1881). During this visit he sent a series of letters, including one written on the 22 August 1851 in which he expressed his passion for his native landscape: ‘I understand better now why so many landscapists recoil in the face of the difficulties presented by the Swiss landscape. But for those who feel and understand it, what an inexhaustible mine. What a source of poetic impressions, of infinite variety!’² The wild, untamed beauty of Handeck and its surrounding area was of particularly great significance to Calame, and became central to his output of majestic Alpine views.

During his numerous visits to the area Calame painted a number of views of Handeck, of which the most famous is his Storm at Handeck (fig. 1), which he exhibited at the Salon of 1839, a painting that he had invited the artist and critic Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846) to see while in his studio. Töpffer wrote: ‘These fir trees of M. Calame … these are, I passionately believe, the first real fir trees which I have seen on canvas.’³ It is a scene of nature unleashed. In the foreground a group of fir trees are buffeted by the storm, the foremost snapped and uprooted. A torrent of water rushes to the front edge and mountains dominate both sides of the background, enveloped by mist and cloud. Many of Calame’s other views of the area, for example Landscape at Handeck (1850–5; Switzerland, private collection) also present landscapes ravaged by storms.⁴ Others, by contrast, for example View taken at Handeck of 1837 (fig. 2), show idyllic mountain landscapes under blue skies.⁵ In a variant painted in 1837 the waterfall itself is glimpsed beyond the jutting cliff, tumbling into the right‐hand corner. In the background rises a white mountain, referred to by the critic John Coindet as ‘le glacier, beau et vrai…’.⁶

A number of Calame’s views concentrate more closely on the waterfall itself. In 1835 he was commissioned by an Irish noblewoman, Lady Osborne, to paint a view of the falls, Waterfall at Handeck (completed in 1839), based on sketches and drawings made during his 1835 and 1838 visits.⁷ In about 1846–50 he painted a close‐up study of the flowing water, The Falls of the Aare at Handeck,⁸ and in 1850 he made a further close‐up view of the falls, this time in watercolour.⁹ Such views could also be combined with wild weather. In High Mountain Gorge (The Handeck Valley in the Canton of Berne) of 1854–5 (fig. 3), commissioned in 1854 by Joachim Heinrich Wagener (1782–1861), the falls’ thunderous descent on the left is dwarfed by prominent fir trees in the right foreground, whipped by the wind.¹⁰

In all these depictions of the falls the artist is facing south. In a series of four paintings entitled At the Waterfall at Handeck of 1842–3, of which the main version is in the Reinhart Foundation, Winterthur (fig. 4), Calame is looking north towards the Haslital.¹¹ He shows the deep gorge with a small wooden bridge at an angle, a backdrop of mountains (with Benzlauistock and the Mährenhorn on the right) and the waterfall only partially depicted at the extreme front edge. In The Handeck (fig. 5) François Diday (1802–1877) painted the same view but looking south: the broken remains of (the same?) wooden bridge lie in the foreground, and to their right the torrent of water emerges from between two cliffs of rock. The right background is dominated by a mountain shrouded in mist, which gives way to clearer sky at the left.¹²

The view in NG 6660 is towards the south, and it is [page 61] [page 62] possible that the background, with its three waterfalls, depicts the Aare glaciers themselves, and perhaps the Handeck Falls in the narrow pass a little further forward. The distinctive mountain in the left background could be tentatively identified as the Gerstenhörner, which lies to the east of the Grimsel Pass. The river curves to the west towards the glaciers (which are situated to the south‐west of the valley, just to the east of the Finsteraarhorn), making the view properly south‐west rather than south. As the distant mountains do not compare particularly closely with either of those in the background of the Diday, or those in View taken at Handeck of 1837 (perhaps the snow‐covered mountain here could lie to the right of NG 6660), differences could be explained by the angle of viewing.

Calame’s Trees

The exquisite rendering of the evergreen foliage in NG 6660 has already been noted. Calame made studies of a variety of trees throughout his life. Eugène Rambert relates an incident recounted by Auguste Bachelin (1830–1890) of how, when Calame declined to paint a lime tree, one of his pupils asserted that it was because he did not have a brush for this tree, [page 63]and that he only had three brushes, for beech, oak and fir. Refuting this malicious story, Rambert writes that Calame must have owned many more than three, seeing how well he was able to capture the foliage of each species: And his chestnut trees of Evian, are they painted by a man who is missing a chestnut tree brush? And his pines of the forest of Finges? And his creeping pines of the high Alps? And his walnut trees mutilated by storms? And his pine trees of Chamouny? And his maple trees which make such beautiful forests? … The truth is that few painters have captured the character of each type of foliage as well as he.¹³ In his Swiss scenes painted during the 1850s Calame frequently gave single trees centre stage, as in Tall Pine Tree with Rocks (about 1850; Switzerland, private collection).¹⁴ This included a number painted at Handeck in which trees are the principal motif, many of them devastated by the elements.¹⁵ Even where groups of trees are presented, one would often be given especial prominence. In Pine Trees at Handeck (about 1851–2; Winterthur, Kunstmuseum) the picture is divided in half vertically by the central tall tree reaching almost to the top edge.¹⁶ Andrés classifies this picture as one of Calame’s large, highly detailed studies, which he painted, or at least started, on the spot and went on to use either in teaching or in his own studio production.¹⁷

If small in scale, NG 6660 could also be classed as a highly detailed study, and is related to Calame’s other studies of single or prominent trees. There is one picture with which it can be compared particularly closely, The Lütschen Valley with the Wetterhorn (fig. 6), a precipitous view down into the valley of the Schwartze Lütschine, the peak of the Wetterhorn misty in the distance.¹⁸ The foreground is pierced by a tree standing dead centre behind some rocks. Tall, wispy, with few branches, it appears to be clinging onto life, and its neighbour to the left appears to be dying. The valley below is lush and green, the river, as in At Handeck, a silvery streak.

The Tree as Symbol

The central tree in NG 6660, while standing proud, has also suffered at the mercy of nature, with most of the lower branches broken away. Many see these impaired, dying or even dead trees, so prevalent in Calame’s work, as symbols of both their, and nature’s, vulnerability. Calame’s trees can also be read as symbols of humanity: the central tree in NG 6660 could be compared to a solitary wanderer.¹⁹ Alberto de Andrés writes, ‘In At Handeck, the heroic fir tree, in its drive to ascend despite the adversity that seems to overwhelm it, symbolizes the epic journey of man on his eschatological destiny’, and quotes from Calame: ‘[The fir tree] before being uprooted rules over vast solitudes alone with God’.²⁰ For Valentina Anker, Calame’s trees also represent mankind, embodying the Romantic theme of man battling the storms of life or the forces of nature.²¹ She describes the foreground trees of The Lütschen Valley with the Wetterhorn: ‘The allegorical firs of the foreground, rendered gaunt by bad weather as men are tormented by a difficult fate, are characteristic of those Calame wanted to paint in the 50s, at a time where he had suffered a number of bereavements.’²² His use of nature as symbol echoed the practice of the German Romantics; in response to criticism of his Tetschen Altarpiece (1807–8; Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden), Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) wrote of the different meanings of the natural elements, the fir trees themselves ‘evergreen enduring through all ages, like the hopes of man in Him, the Crucified’.²³

Rambert compared Calame with Théodore Rousseau, writing that he never saw the latter painting a tree for its own sake. Calame, on the other hand, considered his trees as individuals, as living beings. Rambert also compared him with Salomon van Ruysdael (1600/3–1670), who presented his trees bowed down under the weight of existence, whereas ‘Calame aime à donner à l’arbre le caractère de la fierté’ (‘Calame likes to give a tree the character of dignity’). He describes the fir tree painted in 1855 for M. Metzler of Frankfurt: ‘… with what audacity of vertical projection he soars up from the summit of a mound, formed of blocks heaped up, and which serves it as a pedestal! This fir tree has a motto: To the stars.’²⁴ Compare this with the image of the trees worshipping their maker offered by the Romantic [page [64]] [page 65] poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) in ‘The Fall of the Aare – Handec’, a poem inspired by Handeck itself: ‘Nor doubt but He to whom yon Pinetrees nod / Their heads in sign of worship, Nature’s God, / These humbler adorations will receive.’²⁵

This notion of the hand of God in all nature, of nature as a mirror to God, would have been central to Calame’s deep religiosity, and it is not difficult to interpret his painstaking realism, his intricate studies of trees, his attitude to individual foliage, as the consequence of a belief in God manifest in the natural world. In many ways Calame, consciously or not, combatted the notion promulgated by the academies, that landscape was a lowly form of art because it could not convey, and thus inspire in the beholder, the lofty emotions evoked by history painting. Instead he held up a nature which, possessed of its own symbols and religious meaning, was able to compete with such exalted scenes of human drama.

Provenance

NG 6660 was in the possession of the artist until his death; Calame’s sale, Paris, 13–22 March 1865, no. 351;²⁶ in the collection of Hans Bühler, Berg am Irchel, Switzerland, this presumably the same as Hans Eduard Bühler (1893–1967), industrialist, horse‐rider and sculptor;²⁷ sale, Sotheby’s, Zurich, 11 December 1997, lot 124, where purchased by Asbjørn Lunde (1927–2017), New York;²⁸ presented by Mr Asbjørn Lunde to the American Friends of the National Gallery in 2012, by whom placed on long‐term loan to the Gallery; presented by Mr Asbjørn Lunde through the American Friends of the National Gallery, 2016.

Exhibitions

Williamstown 2006 (19); London 2011 (40).

Literature

De Andrés 2006, p. 28.

Notes