View Near The Village Of Gy, In The Geneva Region

Medium: Oil On Paper Laid On Board
Size: 37.5 x 50.8 cm (14.8 x 20 in)

Literature: “Adam-Wolfgang Töpffer,” in Daniel Baud-Bovy, Peintres Genevois: 1766-1849, Töpffer, Massot, Agasse, Geneva, 1904; Lucien Boissonnas, Wolfgang-Adam Töpffer, Lausanne, 1996.

The increasing prosperity of Geneva, positioned as it was on the borders of France but free of the latter's financial controls, led to the establishment of an expanding and wealthy bourgeoisie. While the Genevois generally eschewed the grand tastes of their wealthy neighbor, they nonetheless welcomed the opportunity to have their portraits painted. The most successful painter of Geneva society during the eighteenth century was the pastelist Jean-Etienne Liotard, one of the greatest of all artists working in that medium. This portrait tradition had occupied the young Töpffer in his early career but by the turn of the century he had already begun to experiment with landscape and genre subjects.

Since Geneva had provided no opportunity for a sophisticated artistic training, Töpffer had gone to Paris in 1789 to join his compatriot Agasse with whom he occasionally worked together, arriving in the midst of revolutionary turmoil. His first master was the Flemish born J.B. Suvée, an history painter of solid reputation who was later to become director of the French Academy in Rome. Töpffer's French training not only ensured that he was well-schooled in draftsmanship and honed his technical skills but also exposed him to a changing and diverse artistic milieu. History painting held few attractions for him, however, and over the succeeding five years he earned his living producing small scale portraits in watercolor and gouache. Criticized for their "bluish" tones and "effeminate elegance" (Baud-Bovy, p. 24), their aristocratic refinement was perhaps seen as a rejection of the honest republican values expected of a citizen of Geneva. Although we may suppose that he must have produced a number of such works between 1790 and his debut at the Geneva Salon in 1796, only a handful have been identified of which the most notable are the Portrait of the Picot Brothers (Baud-Bovy, p.22), the Portrait of the Artist's Wife (Baud-Bovy, p.23) and the Portrait of the families of François Dubois and Jean Conrad Arnold (1794-6, Geneva, Museum of Art and History). While his later oil paintings share similarities with the northern genre painters such as Demarne, in his watercolor technique the artist retained the same careful draftsmanship and soft colors of the early works (see, for example, En Manoeuvres, Baud-Bovy, p.30).

Töpffer was also exposed to the influence of Pierre Henri de Valenciennes who was not only the acknowledged master of the paysage historique but the strongest advocate of plein-air painting - reproducing nature as one saw it, as immediately as possible. Töpffer was the first Swiss artist to embrace Valenciennes’ maxims on landscape painting and in this example he has done so on a scale almost unmatched in his oeuvre or that of his contemporaries. Comparable works may be found in the Oskar Reinhart Stiftung in Winterthur and the Museum of Art and History in Geneva. The identification of this work has been confirmed by Dr Lucien Boissonnas (letter dated 15 June 1996).