Plinio Colombi (1873-1951) is remembered today on two distinct fronts: as a Swiss landscape painter working in the Bernese Alps, and as a designer of some of the most striking Swiss railway and tourism posters of the interwar period. Born in Ravecchia, near Bellinzona in Ticino, he studied architecture at the Technikum in Winterthur before training instead in decorative and artistic design, working in Paris around the turn of the century and subsequently as a decorative painter in Bern. From 1899 he established himself as an independent artist, eventually settling in Spiez, in the Bernese Oberland, from 1924 until his death there in 1951.
Colombi's poster work, commissioned by Swiss railway companies to promote destinations including St Moritz and the scenic Lötschberg-Simplon line, brought his images of Alpine scenery to a mass audience through the interwar boom in tourism travel, and these posters, produced in the 1920s and 1930s, remain sought after today as examples of the golden age of Swiss travel graphic design. Alongside this commercial output, he continued to paint landscapes of the Bernese Oberland in oil and watercolour, exhibiting at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1939, and his fine-art work displays the same confident sense of Alpine light and atmosphere that distinguishes his poster designs.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings' view of the Lauterbrunnen Valley in the Bernese Oberland shows Colombi working in this landscape tradition, depicting one of the most celebrated valleys of the region he made his lifelong home, and situates him within the gallery's broader holdings of nineteenth and twentieth-century Bernese Oberland subjects.