CHARLES GIRON (1850–1914)
The Schilthorn (2,970 m - 9,744 ft)
Switzerland
In Le nuvole Valle di Lauterbrunnen, 1901, oil on canvas, Musée Jenish, Vevey
The mountain
The Schilthorn (2,970 m- 9,744 ft) is a peak in the Bernese Alps in Switzerland, near the alpine village of Mürren. Access to the village of Mürren and the summit of Schilthorn is impossible by road. To get there from the valley, take a series of cable cars, the first part of Stechelberg to join Gimmelwald, then Mürren. From Mürren a second cable car leads to Birg, from where a third joins the Schilthorn1. Another way to reach Mürren is to take the cable car from Lauterbrunnen to Grütschalp, then the train to Mürren.
The painter
Charles Alexandre Giron is a painter and critic of Swiss art who took lessons with François Diday and Barthélemy Menn in Geneva. In 1872, he went to Paris and frequented the Swiss painters installed in the boarding house of the Hotel de Nice, No. 4 rue des Beaux-Arts before sharing until 1890 the successive workshops of the French painter Michel Maximilian Leenhardt. He thus becomes friends with Gustave Henri de Beaumont and Albert Bartholomew. He enters the studio of Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and officially begins at the Salon of 1876 with portraits and landscapes. As an art critic, he defends the painter Ferdinand Hodler. He worked in Paris and Cannes, then joined Switzerland in 1896. The city of Geneva gave its name to a street and a school.