Gabriel Loppé

A gift from the artist to Alfred Wills (1828–1912), Hampshire (Wills was a High Court judge and third President of the Alpine Club, from 1863–65. Wills met Loppé in Chamonix and the two men forged a fast and lifelong friendship);

Thence by descent in his family.

Marie-Noёl Borgeaud, Gabriel Loppé, Peintre, Photographe et Alpiniste, Grenoble 2002, p. 89, reproduced in colour.

This view is an important rediscovery in artist's oeuvre, hitherto been known only from photographs, having remained in the possession of the family of its first owner.

Loppé painted this view of Mont Blanc’s Glacier du Géant looking up from the top of the Tacul Glacier. Both ice fields come together at this point at around 3,000 metres and flow down to the north becoming the Mer de Glace. Despite significant shrinkage today due to a warmer climate, the Glacier du Géant remains the steepest and most crevassed of the three glaciers and the 4,013-metre granite spike known as the Aiguille or Dent du Géant is visible far up and off to the left of the composition. Loppé often painted in situ here as this was the only way to cross into Italy via Courmayeur travelling on foot from Chamonix. In 1871, Loppé and his closest friend in the Alps, Sir Leslie Stephen made the first ascent of Mont Mallet which lies just to the left of the Dent du Géant.

'As a prolific artist and mountaineer, Gabriel Loppé is now recognized as the first painter to have depicted what the French call la haute montagne. He was the founder of the peintre-alpiniste school of painting, and with a brush in one hand and an ice axe in the other, his eighty-eight years were lived with a great independence of spirit which rewarded him at every turn.

Loppé was in the prime of his life when mountaineering became an established activity in the 1860s and painting outdoors – en plein air – was becoming popular. The manifest advances in industry and engineering also enabled Loppé to divide his time between Chamonix, Paris and London. The man was in every respect a product of his age with a very real affinity for people and urban life. Against a backdrop of shifting political and cultural ideals, he espoused progress and the concept of modernité expressed by Baudelaire in his 1864 essay The Painter of Modern Life.' (William Mitchell, Loppé. Peintre alpiniste, London, 2018, p. 7).

We are grateful to William Mitchell for his assistance with cataloguing this work.