View from Brunnen onto the Swiss Alps and the Vierwaldstädter Lake
signed, inscribed and dated lower right: ‘Brunnen 24 Jeniy 35. TF’, oil on paper laid down on panel
245 x 345 mm.
Provenance
Hofjägermeister Thomas Fearnley (the only son of the painter), Oslo, 1841-1927; thence by descent to the artist’s great-granddaughter; bequeathed by the above in 1994 to a member of the Fearnley Family living in the UK
This striking small oil sketch is one of Fearnley’s freshest ‘Naturvei’, a nature study made on the spot ‘en plein air’ on the 21st of June 1835. The artist only had left his beloved Rome and Italy a few weeks earlier, traveling via Florence, Milan and Como towards St. Gotthard. On the 20th of June, he arrived in Brunnen immediately sketching the scenic grandeur of the surrounding mountains. The present view is taken from the shores of the Vierwaldstädter Lake near Brunnen looking across the lake on to the Swiss Alps. According to Sigurd Willoch, his first biographer, “his meeting with the mountain world of the Alps seemed to steel him, all the masculine force in him asserts itself. The studies from this summer are full of force, and the colouring is deeper than in the Italian sketches”. From Brunnen Fearnley travelled to Meiringen in Haslital. He then crossed the Scheidegg to Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen and Brienz. During his excursions in the Alps he met the young Düsseldorf artist Johann Wilhelm Schiermer before leaving Switzerland via Lucerne in September for Paris. Fearnley stayed in Paris for the next six month exhibiting without success at the Paris Salon and generally being dissatisfied with the French capital and its difficult conditions.
