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Alpine Landscape: The Handegg, Switzerland
Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, 1824–1904)
1850s
- Medium
- oil on fabric
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 36 x 47 x 5.5 cm (14 3/16 x 18 1/2 x 2 3/16 in.); Unframed: 26.8 x 37 cm (10 9/16 x 14 9/16 in.)
- Culture
- France, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Bequest of Noah L. Butkin
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
This painting depicts a mountain peak near Handegg, a village just south of Lucerne, Switzerland. Tall fir trees reach upward from the dark foreground toward the light, which illuminates the sky and snowcapped mountains. Rising like church steeples, the trees almost touch the top of the canvas, conveying a feeling of spiritual striving. This expression of romantic, almost religious sentiment inspired by the power and beauty of nature is surprising for Gérôme, one of the leading artists of academic realism, a style distinguished by firm, precise drawing.
