Lot 189: CHARLES EDOUARD BOUTIBONNE FRENCH, 1816-1897

signed and dated E. Boutibonne 1870 l.r.

oil on panel

64.5 by 49cm., 25 1/2 by 19 1/4 in.

PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF THE 6TH MARQUESS OF BRISTOL

Richard Green, London
Acquired by Victor, 6th Marquess of Bristol (1915-1985) in the 1970s; thence by descent

A student of Friedrich von Amerling in Vienna and Achille Dévéria and Franz Winterhalter in Paris, Boutibonne achieved initial prestige as a court portraitist for Napoléon III. During the 1860s he was a regular exhibitor at the Paris Salon and in 1867 was elected a member of L'Association artistique du canton de Berne in Switzerland, where he later made his home in Wilderswil near Interlaken.

The Young Mountaineers, painted in 1868, depicts a group of four young lady tourists hill-walking above a Swiss lake accompanied by their even younger guide, a local lad familiar with the terrain. Alpine walking had become a fashionable holiday pursuit by the mid nineteenth-century. A number of key Alpine conquests, such as Sir Alfred Wills' ascent of the Wetterhorn in 1854 and Edward Whymper's conquest of the Matterhorn in 1865 had captured people's imaginations, while the Alpine Club, founded in London in 1857 and soon imitated in most European countries, opened up mountaineering as a sport for the first time. In a rapidly industrialising Europe, many saw the Alps as a retreat in which to re-discover and commune with nature; while others went for health reasons, to 'take the air' in one of the many Luftkurorte (air cure resorts). Whatever their motivations, improved railway links made Switzerland more accessible to tourists than ever before.

In 1854 Boutibonne had travelled to England where he painted portraits of Queen Victoria and Albert, and would have observed at first hand the manners and mores of the British aristocracy and well-heeled upper middle classes. Boutibonne may well have modelled his young mountaineers on the ladies of good family he had met in England, and even pokes a little gentle fun. Their latest town fashions are hardly those of explorers, while the girl in red is unaccustomed to the sunshine let alone the hills, perching her hat on the top of her walking stick as a parasol.