View near the village of Gy, in the Geneva region

(Wolfgang-Adam Topffer)

Töpffer’s oil sketches are relatively rare and, indeed, it is not known whether he used such plein air works as memory aids or as the preliminary stage of a finished work. Although he had begun his career as a painter of figures, of genre scenes, portraits and caricatures, by 1801 he had begun to produce finished landscapes, as a work of that year now in the Hermitage attests. These finished works are idealized and owe as much to seventeenth century Dutch landscapes as they do to the work of Valenciennes and the leading contemporary masters of the French school. In the splendid Pêche au filet (Geneva, Museum of Art and History, fig. 1) of 1805, however, the distant landscape is not only more fully resolved but evidently includes topographical features that the artist has used as part of a grander conception. Although Töpffer did few paintings in which landscape predominates, in the later works these elements are more often specific rather than idealized. The village of Gy is situated in rich farmland near Geneva. Evidently painted en plein air, a low ridge divides the picture plane, allowing us just a glimpse of a patchwork of fields with multi-colored crops marked out by the brilliant summer sun. On the right of the composition a splendid oak casts its shadow, while some low bushes stand out against the darker ridge in the right foreground. Immediately before the viewer lies a patch of emerald green, and beyond a distant view across a low plain towards some low hills, just visible against the horizon. There are no figures and no buildings, the artist has eschewed drama and obvious effect for truth to nature and bucolic tranquility. Lucien Boisonnas has suggested a date 1810-15 for this work.

LITERATURE: To be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné of the works of Wolfgang-AdamTöpffer by Lucien Boisonnas.

Matthiesen Gallery and Stair Sainty Matthiesen , The Gallic Prospect, 1999