Alexandre Calame

Alexandre Calame made his name in 1839 with a single canvas, Storm at Handeck, a wall of black cloud breaking over a waterfall in the Bernese Alps. Shown first in Geneva and then at the Paris Salon, where it won a gold medal, it made Swiss mountain scenery fashionable across Europe almost overnight.

Calame had come to painting the hard way. His father, a marble cutter in the town of Vevey on Lake Geneva, lost the family money, and the boy was put to work in a bank at 15. A Geneva banker named Diodati noticed his sketches and paid for lessons with François Diday, then the leading Swiss landscape painter, and Calame soon outgrew his teacher. He went up into the high valleys to draw storms, dead firs and bare rock, painting the Alps at their most vast and dangerous.

His pictures sold as far as Russia and the United States, and his Geneva studio trained a whole generation of Swiss landscape painters. In 1854 he gathered his method into a set of printed drawing lessons, the Leçons de dessin, still studied after his death in 1864.