CHARLES GIRON (1850–1914)
The Mont Blanc (4,808 m - 15,776 ft)
France - Italy border
In Le Mont Blanc near Tête Noire, oil on canvas, 1890
The mountain
Mont Blanc (in French) or Monte Bianco (in Italian), both meaning "White Mountain", is the highest mountain in the Alps and the highest in Europe after the Caucasus peaks. It rises 4,808.73 m (15,777 ft) above sea level and is ranked 11th in the world in topographic prominence. The Mont Blanc is one of the Seven Summit, which includes the highest mountains of each of the seven continents. Summiting all of them is regarded as a mountaineering challenge, first achieved on April 30, 1985 by Richard Bass. The 7 highest summit, (which are obviously 8 with 2 in Europe !) are :
Mount Everest (8,848m), Aconcagua (6,961m), Mt Denali or Mc Kinley (6,194m), Kilimandjaro (5,895m), Mt Elbrus (5,642m), Mount Vinson (4,892m) and Mount Kosciuszko (2,228m) in Australia.
The mountain lies in a range called the Graian Alps, between the regions of Aosta Valley, Italy, and Savoie and Haute-Savoie, France. The location of the summit is on the watershed line between the valleys of Ferret and Veny in Italy and the valleys of Montjoie, and Arve in France. The Mont Blanc massif is popular for mountaineering, hiking, skiing, and snowboarding.
The three towns and their communes which surround Mont Blanc are Courmayeur in Aosta Valley, Italy, and Saint-Gervais-les-Bains and Chamonix in Haute-Savoie, France. A cable car ascends and crosses the mountain range from Courmayeur to Chamonix, through the Col du Géant. Constructed beginning in 1957 and completed in 1965, the 11.6 km (7¼ mi) Mont Blanc Tunnel runs beneath the mountain between these two countries and is one of the major trans-Alpine transport routes.
Since the French Revolution, the issue of the ownership of the summit has been debated.
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.