The author of the picture A Mountain Lake, Swiss artist Alexandre Calame, was one of the most popular painters of the 19th century. He was acclaimed as a master of romantic Alpine landscape. Today, his paintings and graphic works make part of museum collections in London, Paris, Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Alexandre Calame embarked on drawing and painting at a very young age. His preferred subject for the pictures were Swiss views: mountains and lakes, rivers and forests. Later, he started to take lessons from painter François Diday. At the age of 25, the artist was already a participant of art shows in Berlin and Paris. At the same time, he began to create lithographic prints, copper plates and artistic miniatures depicting nature of Switzerland. Viewers liked his works for authenticity, because it was always easy to recognize particular localities in them.

In 1844, Calame set off on a journey around Italy. He visited Rome and Naples, where he made sketches of local scenery and painted his tableaus. A year later, the artist was elected honorary free associate member of the Russian Academy of Arts; the title was conferred for outstanding merit in arts.

By the 1850s, Alexandre Calame had established himself as one of the most popular painters in Europe. His works influenced the oeuvre of Russian painters Ivan Shishkin, Vladimir Orlovsky, Piotr Sukhodolsky, Arseny Meschersky and Alexei Bogolyubov. All of them studied at his Geneva-based workshop. In 1853, Calame’s picture The Lake of the Four Cantons was awarded a prize of the International Exhibition in Paris, and was bought by Emperor Napoleon III afterwards. Among his clients were Louis Philippe, King of the French, and Alexandra Feodorovna, the wife of Russian Emperor Nicholas I.

Quite frequently, one and the same scenery was featured in four paintings, as Alexandre Calame strove to show one Swiss place or another in different seasons or at different times of day: in the morning, in the daytime, in the evening and at night. This peculiarity is considered the highlight of the artist’s legacy.

A Mountain Lake was painted by Alexandre Calame in the Bernese Alps. It shows a shallow river flowing into Lake Thun. In this work, the artist opted not to use a steady sunlight, so peculiar to classic landscape. In his background, Calame gradually diluted colors, creating an illusion of genuine wild nature that was not improved by human efforts.

The canvas came to the Tambov Picture Gallery from the Tambov Regional Ethnography Museum in 1962. Before that, it had been part of Pavel Stroganov’s collection.