International studio (16.1902)

A Swiss Painter

This is apparent in that beautiful landscape
Les Nuees, which was painted last spring and
exhibited a few months later at the Vevey Exhi-
bition. This work has all the enchantment of an
evocation. A part of the higher summits is seen
purple with the last rays of the setting sun, while
the neighbouring peaks are already pale with that
death-like whiteness which succeeds the “ alpeng-
liihn.” From the depths of the valley rise the
clouds represented as a troop of exquisitely graceful
human forms, dancing in the light upper air into
which they will soon dissolve. The fairy, ephemeral
appearance of these forms,—as if they were indeed
evolved out of such stuff as clouds are made of—
and their drifting there at that twilight hour against
the background of the everlasting mountains is as
admirably suggestive in conception as it is delicate
and beautiful in execution. M. Giron has just
finished a picture, the Fete de Lutteurs, the land-

“ l’ete” (Photograph by Hanfstaengl)
84

scape of which he considers the best piece of
work of the kind he has as yet painted. He has
also completed a vast decorative panel which has
recently been placed in the new Palais du Parle-
ment at Bern. The subject is a landscape of plain
and mountains representative of the historic soil of
Switzerland, the cradle of the Swiss Confederation.
The spirit in which this work is conceived, and the
style in which it is executed, are worthy of the
highest praise. The artist has had recourse neither
to the arabesque nor to la formule symetrique.
The effect of the whole is produced by the realisa-
tion of the decorative value and possibilities of the
great lines of a severe architectural Alpine landscape,
and the accords between colours powerful and yet
dull as in a pastel.
Perhaps nowhere does the essentially Swiss cha-
racter of Mr. .Giron’s art come out more fully than
in that delightful series' of pictures he calls his
mountaineers, viz. :—Les
Vieax, La Lecture,
L'Ardoisier, L’Accord,
Fillettes Valaisannes ; the
numerous studies he has
made of mountaineers for
his Fete de Lutteurs, and
in such a beautiful evoca-
tion of a national type as
Jeune Unterwaldoise.
There can be no doubt
that Mr. Giron is one of
the most remarkable of
living Swiss portrait -
painters, and in many of
his portraits he has caught
and fixed with unerring
knowledge, feeling and
power the characteristi-
cally Swiss physiognomy-
The Portrait de Madame
X. (page 89), one of the
most exquisite he has
done, holds a place apart.
As far as the material in
which he works is con-
cerned, he says :—“ I like
black for the variety and
beauty of its aspects.
Several years ago I pro-
duced a curious resume
of the figure of a chimney-
sweep, very black on a
black back-ground, the
by charles giron child holding out a bright