FRANZ SCHRADER (1844-1924)
Pique-Longue Vignemale (3,928m - 10, 820ft)
France - Spain border
In Le Pic de Vignemale, 1900, oil on canvas. Private collection.
The mountain
The Pic de Vignemale (3,928m - 10, 820ft) also called in Occitan Vinhamala and in Aragonese Comachibosa is the highest of the French Pyrenean summits, on the border with Spain (the highest in the whole of the range is Pic Aneto).The Vignemale is the name given to the mountain massif, which also straddles into Spain. It consists of several distinct summits, the predominant ones being Grand Vignemale or Pique-Longue (3,298 m), Pointe Chausenque (3,204 m) and Petit Vignemale (3,032 m). The Vignemale is also the site of the second largest of the Pyrenean glaciers (after Aneto's one), the Ossoue (with around 0.6 kmІ), across which the "voie normale", or standard route to the summit travels.
One of its most dramatic aspects is the North Face upon which lie a number of serious ascent routes requiring skill and commitment. Below the North Face is the impressively situated mountain refuge - the Refuge des Oulettes de Gaube. The approach from the north entails a delightful walk up to and around the picturesque Lac de Gaube giving increasingly dramatic views of the mountain.
Almost synonymous with the Vignemale is the name of Count Henry Russell, an eccentric of the Victorian era who developed a lifelong passion for the mountain.
The painter
Jean-Daniel-François Schrader, better known as Franz Schrader, was a French mountaineer, geographer, cartographer and landscape painter. He made an important contribution to the mapping of the Pyrenees and was highly considered among the pyreneists.
He is the son of Prussian Ferdinand Schrader from Magdeburg, who emigrated to Bordeaux, and of Marie-Louise Ducos, cousin of geographers Élisée and Onésime Reclus. He shows a talent for drawing from an early age. In 1866, while staying with his friend Léonce Lourde-Rocheblave in Pau, he has a sort of revelation at the "spectacle grandiose de la barrière montagneuse des Pyrenées ".
His vocation strengthens when reading stories by Ramond de Carbonnières (1755-1827) (Les Voyages au Mont-Perdu) and by Henry Russell (1834-1909) (Les Grandes Ascensions des Pyrénées, guide d'une mer à l'autre).
While devoting the main part of his leisure to long hikes in the mountains, during which he gathers thousands of observations for his topographical records, he still finds time to paint numerous panoramas of the Pyrenees as well as the Alps which he also studies, and to acquire a solid formation in topography.
To facilitate topographical work in rugged terrain, he develops the orograph in 1873. His first great cartographic work, in 1874, is the map of the massif of Gavarnie-Mont-Perdu at a scale of 1:40 000, for which he collects the measurements with the participation of Lourde-Rocheblave from nearby Pau. That map triggers such a sensation that it is included in the annual Mémoires of the Société des Sciences Physiques et Naturelles de Bordeaux with an explanatory text the following year. The Club alpin français directory follows with the publication of an enthusiastic review, describing Schrader as qualified for "first rank topographer in a glorious master stroke". In 1876 he takes part in the creation of the Bordeaux section of the Club Alpin Français, becoming its first president.
In 1877 he travels to Paris with a recommendation from his cousins Élisée and Onésime Reclus. There, having met Émile Templier, nephew and collaborator of Louis Hachette, and Adolphe Joanne, president of the Parisian section of the Club Alpin Français, he is employed as a geographer by Librairie Hachette and is now able to practice his passion in the scope of his profession. He also gives geography lessons at the School of Anthropology and also becomes editor of the French Alpine Club directory.
On August 11, 1878, accompanied by high-mountain guide Henri Passet, he carries out the first known ascension of the Grand Batchimale (3,176 m), consequently renamed Pic Schrader.
In 1880, he is promoted director of cartography for Hachette and aims at surpassing in quality the Stieler Atlas, by German Adolf Stieler. On November 25, 1897, as vice-president of the C.A.F. he holds a conference at the Club Alpin which constitutes his true esthetic credo of the mountain and in which he announces the imminent foundation of a French school of mountain painting. The conference text title is : À quoi tient la beauté des montagnes (What makes the beauty of mountains); this speech is considered as the birth bulletin of La Société des peintres de montagne (Paris) and its text is reproduced in 1898 in the Club Alpin Français directory.
From 1901 to 1904, he actively contributes to the Guides Joanne of the Librairie Hachette, which in 1919 became the famous Guides bleus.
The scientific commission created by Franz Schrader in the Club Alpin Français still exists today, as well as the Société des Peintres de Montagne.
In 1927, three years after his death, his remains are transferred to a tomb on a slope of the Circus of Gavarnie (French Pyrenees).