Alexandre Calame

Alexandre Calame (28 May 1810 – 19 March 1864) was a Swiss landscape painter, associated with the

Biography

He was born in Arabie at the time belonging to Corsier-sur-Vevey, today a part of Vevey. He was the son of a skillful marble worker in Vevey, but because his father lost the family fortune, Calame could not concentrate on art, but rather he was forced to work in a bank from the age of 15. When his father fell from a building and then died, it was up to the young Calame to provide for his mother.

In his spare time he began to practice drawing small views of Switzerland. In 1829 he met his patron, the banker Diodati, who made it possible for him to study under landscape painter François Diday. After a few months he decided to devote himself fully to art.

In 1835 he began exhibiting his Swiss-Alps and forest paintings in Paris and Berlin. He became quite well known, especially in Germany, although Calame was more a drawer than an illustrator. He is associated with the

He went to Italy in 1844 and brought back from Rome and Naples countless paintings, among them one of the ruins of Paestum (in the city museum in Leipzig). He showed that he was capable of understanding Italian nature; but the Alps remained his speciality.

The

One of his most ingenious works is the representation of the four seasons and times of the day in four landscapes, a spring morning in the south, a summer midday in the Nordic flatlands, an Autumn evening, and a winter night on a mountain. He became popular with these large works, and his popularity grew with smaller pieces and lithographies, namely 18 studies of Lauterbrunnen and Meiringen and the 24 sheets of Alpine passes. These were widespread in France, England, and Germany and are still today used to teach this style of painting.

Calame became a correspondent of the Royal Institute of the Netherlands in 1850, he resigned the next year.^[2]

He died in Menton, France, in 1864.

An exhibition featuring more than thirty of Calame's paintings was held at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 2006.

Selected works

• Blick von Petit Saconnex auf Genf und den Montblanc, 1834, Leinwand, 31×44 cm. (Winterthur, Stiftung Oskar Reinhart)
• Die Tempelruinen von Paestum, 1847, Leinwand, 195×260 cm.(Leipzig, Museum of Art)
• Oak Trees. Philadelphia Museum of Art

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alexandre Calame.

• Alexandre Calame in German, French and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.
• "Alexandre Calame". SIKART Lexicon on art in Switzerland.