Lot 1082 | Coastline near Cannes

CALAME, ALEXANDRE
1810 Vevey - 1864 Menton

Title: Coastline near Cannes.
Date: 1853-1860.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 25,5 x 32,5cm.
Frame/Pedestal: Framed.
Verso:
On canvas, frame and stretcher various labels and stamps:
Label of the descendents of Calames: "Etude d'Alexandre Calame retrouvée à l'inventaire de la succession de son fils Arthur Calame, No. 57, Genéve, le 15 Avril 1922 M. Buscarlet-Calame";
Adhesive label with inventory number as well as wax seal "Vente Calame".

Literature:
V. Anker: Alexandre Calame. Vie et Oeuvre, Fribourg 1987, p: 418, cat. rais. no. 566 with ill.

Provenance:
In the artist's Geneva family till 1924: Amélie Calame, widow of the painter, Arthur Calame, son of the painter, his daughter Marguerite Cuscarlet-Calame and son Louis Buscarlet;
Private ownership, Geneva, from 1942;
Auction Sotheby's New York, 24.01.2008, Lot 417;
Private ownership, Germany.

The young Swiss artist Alexandre Calame was not destined to become a highly successful, award-winning and wealthy artist.
The son of a stonemason, he came from a humble background, lost an eye in an accident as a child and had to leave school early to help support his family as an apprentice in a Geneva bank. This was all the more urgent as his father died soon afterwards and Alexandre Calame now had to provide for his mother and himself alone. The boy had taught himself to draw and earned additional money by colouring and selling printed vedute. His mentor noticed Calame's artistic interest and talent and enabled him to receive a thorough artistic education in the studio of the landscape painter Francois Diday. In the mid-1830s Calame exhibited publicly for the first time and immediately won over critics and the public with his landscape paintings. Museum purchases, awards and royal purchases at the exhibitions of the Paris Salons followed and within a few years Alexandre Calame became one of the leading painters of Alpine landscape paintings in Europe thanks to talent, diligence and a skilful business sense. His paintings are represented in all the major museums and collections in Europe and the USA.
His often large-scale, romantically heroic mountain views, which were executed from sketches in the studio, are contrasted with smaller "etudes", which were realised on location and convey the immediacy of an untouched landscape. The present painting, which according to the catalogue raisonné was executed from 1853 onwards, is one such work and shows a beach in the surroundings of Cannes.