THE RITZLIHORN PAINTED BY ALEXANDRE CALAME

ALEXANDRE CALAME (1810-1864) 

Ritzlihorn (3,282m - 10,768 ft) 

Switzerland  

In Le Ritzlihorn et la vallée d’ 'Urbach, oil on canvas

The mountain
The Ritzlihorn  (3,282m - 10,768 ft) is located in the district Interlaken-Oberhasli and the Canton of Bern, in the central part of Switzerland, 70 km southeast of the capital Bern. The Ritzlihorn is part of the Bernese Alps, overlooking Handegg in the canton of Bern.  It lies on the range east of the Gauli Glacier and north of the Bдchlistock. The width at the base of 3.2 kilometers.
The terrain around the Ritzlihorn is mainly mountainous. Around Ritzlihorn it is very sparsely populated, with 2 inhabitants per square kilometer.  The neighborhood consists essentially of grasslands. Tundra climate prevails in the region.  The average annual temperature in the area is -1 ° C. The warmest month is August, when the average temperature is 10 ° C, and the coldest is January, with 12 ° C. Average annual rainfall is 2465 millimeters. The rainiest month is November, with an average of 347 mm of precipitation, and the driest is March, with 113 mm of rainfall.

The Painter 

Alexandre Calame )was a Swiss painter.  He was the son of a skillful marble worker in Vevey. His father lost the family fortune, and Alexandre Calame was forced to work in a bank at the age of 15. When his father fell from a building and then died, the young Calame  provided for his mother.

In his spare time he began to practice drawing small views of Switzerland. In 1829 he met his patron, the banker Diodati, who made it possible for him to study under landscape painter François Diday. After a few months he decided to devote himself fully to art.

In 1835, he began exhibiting his Swiss-Alps and forest paintings in Paris and Berlin. He became quite well known, especially in Germany, although Calame was more a drawer than an illustrator. He is associated with the Dusseldorf school of painting. In 1842 he went to Paris and displayed his works Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, the Brienzersee, the Monte Rosa and Mont Cervin. He taught in Geneva, where Adolf Mosengel was one of his pupils.

He went to Italy in 1844 and brought back from Rome and Naples countless paintings, among them one of the ruins of Paestum (in the city museum in Leipzig). He showed that he was capable of understanding Italian nature; but the Alps remained his speciality.

The glaciers, emerald-green, white foaming mountain water, which split the trees during the storm, and the whipped clouds, the multi-colored rocks, half masked from fog, in the rays of the gleaming sun, are those things, which he knew to be true to nature. 

One of his most ingenious works is the representation of the four seasons and times of the day in four landscapes, a spring morning in the south, a summer midday in the Nordic flatlands, an Autumn evening, and a winter night on a mountain. He became popular with these large works, and his popularity grew with smaller pieces and lithographies, namely 18 studies of Lauterbrunnen and Meiringen and the 24 sheets of Alpine passes. These were widespread in France, England, and Germany and are still today used to teach this style of painting.

He died in Menton, France in 1864.

An exhibition featuring more than thirty of Calame's paintings was held at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 2006.

Reference 

- Alexandre Calama in  Historical Dictionnary of Switzerland