Realism Naturalistic Fall Landscape 20th Century Alexandre Calame

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Naturalistic fall landscape with beautiful green hues. There is a small man in the foreground of the painting. The work … Read more Naturalistic fall landscape with beautiful green hues. There is a small man in the foreground of the painting. The work is framed in a painted wooden frame with a red, slanted greek key pattern. The artists' name is signed on a gold plate in the bottom center of the frame.
Dimensions without Frame: H 12.5 in x W 15.5 in.

Artist Biography: From Switzerland, he became noted for his paintings of Alpine mountains, although he also painted scenes from his travels in Germany and especially Italy. He studied with landscape painter, Francois Diday, and by 1835, had sold a landscape to the museum in Bern. He also exhibited with the Paris Salons beginning in the late 1830s.

Calame lived most of his life in Geneva, but in 1863, he moved to the French Riviera for health reasons.

His composition method was often placing a large clump of trees at one side of the painting and "a sharply receding diagonal leads away from it to a view, often of mountains in the far distance." (83) It was a motif that had much appeal to American collectors of that era, and one of his landscapes, a part of the bequest of James Suydam, was exhibited in New York by the Artists' Fund Society at the National Academy of Design in 1865.

Art historian Valentina Anker theorized that Calame's landscape influenced 19th Century American landscapists such as Thomas Moran, but there is no proof of that assertion. See less