Bibliography
Jörg Zutter and Catherine Lepdor (ed.), La collection du Dr Henri-Auguste Widmer au Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, exb. cat. Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Milan, Skira, 1998: n. 286.
Paul Müller and Viola Radlach, Giovanni Giacometti 1868-1933. Werkkatalog der Gemälde, Swiss Institute for Art Research, Zurich, 1997: vol. II, n.1929.06.
Jörg Zutter, « Giovanni Giacometti et Henri-Auguste Widmer », in: Dieter Schwarz (ed.), Giovanni Giacometti, exb. cat. Winterthur, Lausanne, Coire, Swiss Institute for Art Research, 1996: 14-21.
This portrait was acquired in 1994 to add to the set of seven Giacometti paintings bequeathed to the museum in the late 1930s by the local doctor Henri-Auguste Widmer (1853-1939). The earliest work in the set dates from 1905; all the others were completed late in Giacometti’s career, between 1921 and 1929. Widmer was sixty when he sat for this portrait. He is shown in front of a painting that may be part of his bequest, Lac de Sils en été (Lake Sils, Summer, 1927).
Widmer’s interest in Giacometti was hardly surprising, considering his enthusiasm for post-Impressionist art, particularly the great masters of colour, Kerr-Xavier Roussel and Édouard Vuillard. He was by no means the only buyer in the region for Giacometti, whose work dominated the early-twentieth-century Swiss art market, alongside Ferdinand Hodler and Cuno Amiet. Neuchâtel-based Willy Russ was another of Giacometti’s keen collectors.
Widmer and Giacometti also shared a more personal bond. Widmer loved spending time in the Grisons, taking a suite at the Privat Hotel in Saint-Moritz for part of the year from the early 1910s on. It seems this is where he met Giacometti in around 1925. They stayed close friends until the artist’s death in 1933, in Widmer’s clinic in Valmont, overlooking Montreux. The friendship extended to their wives, Mary Widmer and Annetta Giacometti, and shone through in the paintings purchased or commissioned by Widmer, including a self-portrait of the artist, a portrait of his sculptor son Alberto as a child, another of Annetta and their children, and views of the Upper Engadine where the Giacometti family lived.