Alpine Landscape: The Handegg, Switzerland (1850s): Art, History and Details

Alpine Landscape: The Handegg, Switzerland (1850s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, 1824–1904).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the 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.

Object facts

• Title: Alpine Landscape: The Handegg, Switzerland
• Date: 1850s
• Creator attribution: Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, 1824–1904)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• 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.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1980.262

A detail from the museum

In 1851, Gérôme decorated a vase for Emperor Napoleon III of France which was offered to Prince Albert of England and is now part of the Royal Collection at St. James’s Palace, London.

Collection credit

Bequest of Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1980.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 68, no. 6 (June 1981): 163–219.
• Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.