François Bocion
Saint-Saphorin, 1889

This large painting depicts the village of Saint-Saphorin, recognisable from the unfinished church steeple. The brown tones of the stepped Lavaux vineyards and the Alpine foothills dusted with snow indicate that winter is on its way out. The landscape is reflected in an unusually calm Lake Geneva, ruffled only by the wake of the gulls.

François Bocion’s early works tended to be tightly framed round domestic scenes or men working on and around the lake. In the 1880s, he gradually expanded his focus to capture the landscapes around Lake Geneva. Human figures became scarcer in his work: here, the two fishermen in a skiff and boat with a lateen sail and a cargo of rocks are incidental presences, relegated to the background. Bocion’s work at this period is also characterised by a lighter palette, simpler lines, and more geometric shapes, evident here in the village buildings and form of the mountains.

The painting can usefully be compared with a small preparatory sketch dated April 24, 1888, also in the MCBA collection. The comparison reveals that Bocion considerably reworked the composition of his landscapes when preparing his ambitious paintings in his studio. He found the lack of life and movement in the foreground of his Lake Geneva landscapes a shame and used all sorts of motifs to introduce a sense of energy. As the critic Paul Budry explained, “in the corner of a bedroom he kept a wheelbarrow of stones that he arranged to make the rocky banks breaking the surface of the water in the foreground of all his museum pieces. And perhaps one or two stuffed gulls”. This painting, entitled Mouettes du Léman [Gulls on Lake Geneva], was awarded a silver medal at the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris.