The glacier of Lauteraar

By 1776 a handful of curious travellers had begun doing something their grandparents would have called reckless: climbing into the high Bernese Alps simply to look at the ice. The Lauteraar glacier, set far back in that range, was one of the places they went, and Caspar Wolf painted it that summer from studies he made standing in front of the glacier itself. That large flat rock in the foreground was a real ledge, a spot where those early visitors sat to take in the cold air and the wall of ice above. Wolf places two tiny figures on it, dwarfed by the seracs and the grey moraine. The canvas is fairly small, about 55 by 82 centimetres, yet he gives the ice room to loom, filling the middle distance and pressing the sky into a thin band at the top. The glacier he recorded here has since drawn back far up the valley from where those two figures are sitting.