This wintry study in oils was painted from Lugardon’s studio window in the vieille ville area of the city. The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva has another sketch by Lugardon of the same view but seen in summer. The villages of Cologny and Collonge-Bellerive can be seen on the south shore of the lake far off to the right. The rooftops bound in snow are reminiscent of Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris scenes painted in the 1870s. Together with Gabriel Loppé, the Geneva-born Albert Lugardon studied for a year in Alexandre Calame’s studio and between 1849 and 1851 he went to the Louvre to copy Old Master paintings under Barthélemy Menn’s tutelage. He travelled extensively within Switzerland spending every summer from 1865 onwards painting either in the Bernese Oberland or in the Valais where, in stark contrast to this more personal oil sketch, he made some large format Alpine landscapes including the one which featured in our Peaks & Glaciers exhibition in 2008. His paintings can be seen in the major museums of Bern, Geneva, Zurich and Luzern and towards the mid 1880’s Lugardon began to experiment with photography and the Moment-Photographie movement in London and Geneva.