Gabriel Loppé: a travelling painter in search of modernity

Contemporary with Eugène Boudin, Gabriel Loppé was born about fifteen years before the main Impressionist painters. Specialising very early in mountain landscapes, he developed an aesthetic quite different from that of his contemporaries, no doubt due to the subjects he depicted, which were still relatively uncommon in the 19th century. It was only in the second half of that century that alpine tourism emerged – a phenomenon that coincided with the rise of seaside holidays and sea bathing, which likewise drew the interest of painters (see for example this article). Mountaineering, by contrast, has never been a mass activity – for obvious reasons – and this was even more true at the time. Loppé was one of the rare painters to climb to the ridges and glaciers in order to paint directly from nature. While many landscape artists actually worked in the studio, he would venture out with all his equipment to paint on site, sometimes in challenging weather conditions. When he also took up photography – a technique he had discovered while climbing Mont Blanc with the Bisson brothers – he naturally had to carry the photographic apparatus as well.

The exhibition at the Musée des Ursulines features a wealth of top-quality paintings. Loppé was a master in capturing the atmosphere and colouring unique to the mountains, particularly under cloudy, rainy, or stormy skies (ill. 1). He had a unique talent for rendering snowy and icy landscapes, faithfully reproducing all the chromatic nuances of a white surface that turns almost blue under daylight (ill. 2). The…