French painter, mountaineer and pioneer of Alpine landscape painting, Gabriel Loppé was the first artist to depict what the French call la haute montagne through direct observation. His remarkable career united art and mountaineering, taking him from the glaciers of Chamonix to the summit of Mont Blanc and establishing him as the founder of the peintre-alpiniste tradition.
With eighty-eight years lived with a great independence of spirit, Loppé divided his time between the Chamonix valleys, Paris, Geneva, London and Zermatt. He was in the prime of his life when mountaineering became an established activity in the 1860s and painting outdoors, en plein air, was becoming popular. The manifest advances in industry and engineering of his age enabled this extraordinary life divided between peaks and cities.
