Signed and dated 1875, this oil view of the Château de Chillon on the shores of Lake Geneva was painted at the height of Gabriel Loppé's career as one of the leading French painters of Alpine and Swiss lake scenery. An early elected member of the Alpine Club, Loppé made his name with dramatic studies of Mont Blanc and the high glaciers above Chamonix.

He returned throughout his life to the gentler, luminous light of Lake Geneva at dusk, of which this sunset view of the medieval lakeside castle – one of Switzerland's most painted landmarks - is a fine and characteristic example.

Gabriel Loppé was one of the foremost peintres-alpinistes of the nineteenth century, a painter and mountaineer whose first-hand knowledge of the mountains distinguished his work from that of an earlier generation of Alpine landscape painters. Loppé was among those pioneering artists who worked outdoors, en plein air, making repeated painting and sketching expeditions in an attempt to record the landscape of the Alps first-hand and as faithfully as possible.

Painted in 1875, Lake Geneva: Château de Chillon at sunset depicts one of the most celebrated views on Lake Geneva, or Lac Léman. The Château de Chillon stands on the eastern shore of the lake, near Montreux, against the surrounding Swiss Alpine landscape. Here Loppé has chosen to depict the château at sunset, bringing together the lake, mountains and changing evening light in a subject particularly suited to his fascination with atmosphere.

Loppé's paintings belong to an important period in the history of Alpine landscape painting. Only a generation before him, the Alps had frequently been portrayed as remote, forested and snow-capped visions of the sublime. By the second half of the nineteenth century, mountaineering, exploration and plein-air painting had transformed both the experience and representation of the Alps. Loppé was at the forefront of this change.

An accomplished mountaineer as well as an artist, Loppé travelled extensively through the French and Swiss Alps. His direct experience of the mountains allowed him to paint glaciers, peaks, valleys, lakes and changing weather conditions with an unusual combination of topographical accuracy and atmospheric effect. His subjects ranged from the high-altitude glaciers and summits of Mont Blanc and the mountains around Chamonix and Zermatt to the lakes and lower landscapes of Switzerland.

Lake Geneva: Château de Chillon at sunset demonstrates another aspect of Loppé's Alpine work. Rather than the high glaciers with which his name is particularly associated, the painting takes as its subject Lake Geneva and the historic Château de Chillon. The château's remarkable position on the water, with the mountains rising beyond it, had made Chillon one of the best-known landmarks in Switzerland and an important subject for nineteenth-century artists and travellers.

Loppé's interest in the transient effects of natural light is especially appropriate to the sunset subject. Throughout his career he returned repeatedly to moments when light transformed a familiar landscape, whether illuminating a mountain summit, reflecting from snow and ice or disappearing across a lake and mountain horizon.

Loppé had been a pupil of Alexandre Calame, but his generation approached the Alpine landscape differently. Whereas the mountains had earlier provided painters with visions of the sublime in Nature, Loppé belonged to the generation of climbers and artists who ventured directly into the mountains. By 1860 the Alps were increasingly becoming an arena of exploration and mountaineering, and the work of the peintres-alpinistes provides an important pictorial record of this transformation.

Loppé's position within this tradition is particularly significant. His paintings and pioneering photographs have been the subject of major exhibitions and extensive research, contributing to the modern rediscovery of an artist whose combination of painting and mountaineering gave him an exceptional understanding of the Alpine world.

Today, Gabriel Loppé is recognised as a major painter of the Alps and an important figure in nineteenth-century Alpine art. His paintings of Lake Geneva, Chamonix, Mont Blanc, Zermatt, Grindelwald, Alpine glaciers and the Swiss and French Alps are particularly admired for their direct observation of the landscape and their treatment of changing light and weather.

Lake Geneva: Château de Chillon at sunset was included in John Mitchell Fine Paintings' Peaks & Glaciers 2015, the gallery's long-running series of exhibitions devoted to Alpine paintings, drawings and photography.