Alexandre Calame (1810-1864) is widely regarded as the greatest painter of the Swiss Alps of the nineteenth century and, with his teacher François Diday, the founder of the so-called Geneva school of Alpine landscape painting. Born in Vevey, the son of a marble carver, his childhood was marked by hardship: an accident in 1820 cost him the sight of one eye, and his father's bankruptcy and subsequent death left the sixteen-year-old Calame as sole support for himself and his mother, working as a bank clerk and hand-colouring engraved Alpine views for the print trade to make ends meet. An employer who recognised his talent provided him with a small stipend, enabling him from 1829 to take lessons from François Diday, then the leading landscape painter in Geneva, and by 1830 he had produced his first oil paintings. Calame's breakthrough came in 1839, when his Storm at Handegg, depicting the dramatic falls at Handeck in the Bernese Oberland, won a second-class gold medal at the Paris Salon and was widely taken as a manifesto for a new, specifically Swiss school of Romantic Alpine painting. Success followed rapidly: a first-class gold medal at the 1841 Salon for his View of the Valley of d'Aosta, bought by King Louis-Philippe, and the Legion of Honour in 1842 for Storm-Beaten Oaks. A journey to Holland in 1838 had exposed him to the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape tradition, above all Jacob van Ruisdael, whose influence can be felt in the structural clarity and dramatic skies of Calame's mature work, and he was associated for a time with the Düsseldorf school of painting. He worked extensively from nature in the high Alps before executing his large-scale exhibition paintings in the studio, and opened his own Geneva studio to numerous pupils, among them Adolf Mosengel. Charles Baudelaire, reviewing the 1845 Salon, memorably compared Calame with Diday, suggesting the two were once thought to be the same artist afflicted with "chronic dualism". Calame's paintings found buyers across France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Russia during his lifetime, and he remains represented in major collections including the National Gallery, London, the Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. He died in Menton, on the French Riviera, in 1864. John Mitchell Fine Paintings holds a substantial group of paintings by Calame, encompassing forest interiors, mountain torrents and dramatic high-Alpine subjects across the Bernese Oberland and central Switzerland, reflecting the gallery's long-standing specialism in nineteenth-century Alpine landscape painting explored annually in its Peaks & Glaciers exhibitions. Calame's combination of topographical precision and Romantic sensibility, together with his historical position as the pre-eminent figure of the Geneva school, makes him one of the gallery's most significant Swiss painters, alongside his own teacher François Diday and near-contemporaries such as Johann Gottfried Steffan.