Bibliography
Exposition de l’œuvre de Viollet-le-Duc ouverte au Musée des thermes et de l’Hôtel de Cluny, exh. cat. Paris, Hôtel de Cluny, Paris, Imprimerie Centrale des Chemins de Fer, Paris, A. Chaix et Cie, 1880, cat. 646.
Pierre Frey (ed.), E. Viollet-le-Duc et le Massif du Mont-Blanc 1868-1879, Lausanne, Payot, 1988.
Danielle Chaperon, « 1856 : Un paysage trompeur », in Catherine Lepdor (ed.), Charles Gleyre. Le génie de l’invention, exh. cat. Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Milan, 5 Continents Editions, 2006, p. 191-197.
The renowned architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc painted this watercolour the year he died, while he was working on the renovation of Lausanne cathedral. The lower half shows the Vaud-side shore of Lake Geneva in its natural wild state. The beige paper showing through in places, the earthy tones of the slopes on either side of the river and the small, swift dabs of the brush all add up to an impression of sparse vegetation. The contrast with the upper half, showcasing the lake and the Savoy Alps, is striking. Here, the artist used pencil to flesh out the profile of the mountains in great detail. He then applied a blue wash to the lake and mountains, adding touches of white gouache to indicate snow.
The upper reaches of the lake on the left of the composition are caught in thick ice, chunks of which seem to have broken off to float across the vast expanse of blue. A 1879 landscape painted in Lausanne, entitled Fin de l’époque glaciaire. (Étude de restitution) [End of the glacial period. (Reproduction study)], listed in the catalogue for a posthumous exhibition, offers an interesting interpretation. Viollet-le-Duc regularly visited the Alps in the 1860s, bringing back drawings and watercolours for later geological studies of mountain formation, glacier shrinkage and changes to the Alpine landscape.
Like many other people in the decades from 1870 to 1890, Viollet-le-Duc was fascinated by images of climate upheaval and so-called “primitive” tribes. Decades previously, Charles Gleyre had sparked a new artistic turn with two works, Éléphants and the preparatory drawing Paysage antédiluvien (Antidiluvian landscape), both completed in 1856 and now in the museum. Like Gleyre, Viollet-le-Duc combined observation and imagination in a rare vision of what the countryside round Lake Geneva might have looked like at the end of the Ice Age.