Following the exhibition at Skyway Monte Bianco, Gabriel Loppé, una vita sul Monte Bianco (A Life on Mont Blanc), William Mitchell was invited to co-curate Gabriel Loppé, Artist, Climber, Traveller at Forte di Bard in the Val d’Aosta, together with Anne Friang of the Amis de Gabriel Loppé.
The major retrospective brought together more than 100 paintings, drawings, photographs and objects by Gabriel Loppé (1825–1913), including 65 paintings from public and private collections. Spanning some fifty years of the artist’s career, from the 1860s to the beginning of the twentieth century, it was the largest exhibition to date devoted to the life and work of this pioneering French Alpine painter, mountaineer, photographer and traveller.
At the heart of the exhibition were Loppé’s celebrated paintings of Mont Blanc, Chamonix and the Alps, revealing an artist who climbed deep into the high mountains to paint directly from observation. Glaciers, crevasses, high Alpine peaks and the changing effects of light and weather became recurring subjects throughout his career, establishing Loppé as one of the foremost peintres-alpinistes of the nineteenth century.
The exhibition also explored the remarkable breadth of Loppé’s life beyond Alpine painting, from his extensive travels across Europe to his pioneering experiments with photography. For the first time, Loppé’s own mountaineering and climbing equipment was exhibited alongside his paintings, drawings and photographs, bringing together the different strands of a career in which art and mountaineering were closely intertwined.
Curated by William Mitchell and Anne Friang, Gabriel Loppé, Artist, Climber, Traveller ran at Forte di Bard from December 2022 until January 2024. The exhibition was accompanied by a 210-page fully illustrated catalogue, published in Italian, French and English.