In March 2022, two monumental paintings by Gabriel Loppé (1825–1913) appeared at auction at Artcurial in Paris, representing a remarkable rediscovery in the history of nineteenth-century Alpine painting. The two vast panoramic canvases, Le Cervin vu du Gornergrat, au-dessus de la vallée de Zermatt and La Mer de Glace et les Grands Charmoz, Chamonix, were among the most important works by the pioneering French painter-alpinist ever to have come to auction.
Both paintings were completed in 1874 and transported from Chamonix to London that same year for Loppé’s exhibition of Alpine landscapes at the Conduit Street Gallery. They subsequently disappeared from public view and were considered lost for well over a century. Remarkably, they were rediscovered in 2014 in a house in the French Alps, still rolled inside the cylindrical wooden cases in which they had been transported to London. Their long period in storage had left the canvases in an exceptional state of preservation.
The scale of the paintings reflected Loppé’s ambition to convey the grandeur of the European Alps. Measuring 234 × 348 cm, La Mer de Glace et les Grands Charmoz, Chamonix presented one of the artist’s most celebrated subjects on an extraordinary scale. Loppé knew the Mer de Glace intimately, repeatedly climbing, observing and painting the glacier directly from the mountain landscape. Its companion depicted the Matterhorn from the Gornergrat, looking across the glaciers and mountains above the Zermatt Valley.
William Mitchell, a specialist in Gabriel Loppé and painters of the Alps, acted on behalf of Artcurial as an independent expert in cataloguing both works for the auction. On 22 March 2022, the evening before the sale, he also gave a lecture at Artcurial in Paris on the life and work of Gabriel Loppé.
The paintings were offered at Artcurial on 23 March 2022. La Mer de Glace et les Grands Charmoz, Chamonix was acquired for €419,840 including fees, setting an auction record for a work by Loppé at the time. The painting was pre-empted by the municipality of Chamonix, returning one of Loppé’s great Alpine landscapes to the place with which both the artist and the subject were so closely associated. Le Cervin vu du Gornergrat remained unsold at the auction.
