In September 2023, The Guardian featured James Hart Dyke’s remarkable painting expedition to Mont Blanc, undertaken 150 years after the artist and mountaineer Gabriel Loppé (1825–1913) climbed the same mountain to paint the sunset from its summit.
The project brought together two generations of Alpine painters separated by a century and a half. In July 2022, Hart Dyke climbed Mont Blanc carrying his easel and oil paints, following the historic route taken by Loppé in August 1873. By returning to the same landscape and painting from many of the same surroundings, the expedition offered an extraordinary opportunity to consider how dramatically the glaciers and high Alpine environment have changed since the nineteenth century.
Loppé was one of the great pioneers of Alpine painting. A highly experienced mountaineer as well as an artist, he was among the first painters to work extensively at high altitude and became celebrated for portraying the mountains from a climber’s perspective. Mont Blanc was central to his life and work. He climbed the mountain more than thirty times and repeatedly painted its glaciers, crevasses, peaks and rapidly changing weather conditions from direct observation.
Hart Dyke’s expedition sought to revive this peintre-alpiniste tradition. Rather than simply depicting Mont Blanc from the valley below, he carried his materials into the high mountains and painted en plein air during the ascent.
The expedition followed Mont Blanc’s historic north-face route, including the ancien passage used by the mountain’s first successful climbers in 1786 and subsequently by Loppé. Hart Dyke was accompanied by an experienced team of mountain guides, climbers and photographer Pascal Tournaire. Among the party were renowned French mountaineer Christophe Profit and Gabriel Bellanger, Loppé’s great-great-great-grandson.
What the party encountered demonstrated the extent to which Mont Blanc had altered during the 150 years separating the two painting expeditions. The retreat and deterioration of the glaciers have transformed sections of the historic route. Areas crossed by Loppé in the nineteenth century have become heavily crevassed and considerably more difficult to navigate, while melting ice has contributed to increased instability and rockfall.
For Hart Dyke, the physical differences between the Mont Blanc recorded in Loppé’s nineteenth-century paintings and the mountain before him became an important part of the resulting body of work. Where Loppé had encountered expanses of blue-white snow and ice, Hart Dyke found areas of darkened and deteriorating glacier. The paintings consequently became not only a record of a mountaineering expedition but a contemporary response to the changing Alpine landscape.
One of the most striking works to emerge from the expedition was Death Mask, depicting a glacier pinnacle where much of the ice had disappeared. Its dark surface and stark atmosphere presented a markedly different vision of the Alps from the pristine glaciers familiar from many nineteenth-century paintings.
The expedition culminated in Hart Dyke reaching the summit of Mont Blanc. There, he was able to paint from the same extraordinary setting in which Loppé had worked in August 1873. Standing where his nineteenth-century predecessor had observed and painted the sunset proved particularly significant. The landscape connected the two artists directly, while simultaneously revealing the environmental changes that had taken place during the intervening century and a half.
The resulting paintings formed James Hart Dyke: Mont Blanc, The Summit Paintings, presented by John Mitchell Fine Paintings at Cromwell Place in South Kensington, London, in September and October 2023. Around forty paintings by Hart Dyke were shown alongside works by Gabriel Loppé, allowing visitors to consider nineteenth-century and contemporary interpretations of Mont Blanc together.
The exhibition continued John Mitchell Fine Paintings’ longstanding interest in Alpine painting and the work of Gabriel Loppé. William Mitchell has researched and handled Loppé’s paintings for more than two decades and published the first English-language monograph devoted to the artist in 2018. The gallery’s annual Peaks & Glaciers exhibitions have similarly explored the history of artists working throughout the Alps.
The Mont Blanc expedition allowed that historical research to be approached in an unusually direct way. By retracing Loppé’s route rather than merely studying his paintings from a distance, the team was able to experience the terrain that had shaped his work and compare it with the mountain as it exists today. John Mitchell Fine Paintings' subsequent account of the project notes that the shrinking glaciers and resulting crevasses have made the north face substantially more challenging than it was in 1873.
Hart Dyke was already an experienced painter of remote landscapes before undertaking the Mont Blanc project. His work has taken him to mountain and wilderness environments including the Himalayas, Patagonia, Morocco and the Alps. He first travelled to the Himalayas in 1998 as official artist accompanying the then Prince of Wales and subsequently returned to the region on further painting expeditions. He has also worked as a war artist alongside British forces in Afghanistan and was artist in residence with MI6 in 2009.
Painting in remote environments has become an important part of Hart Dyke’s practice. His experience as a mountaineer enables him to reach locations from which artists have rarely worked, continuing a tradition strongly associated with Loppé in the nineteenth century. John Mitchell Fine Paintings describes Hart Dyke as having developed a worldwide reputation as a mountain and wilderness painter, with expeditions taking him through the Himalayas, Patagonia, Morocco and the Alps.
The 2022 Mont Blanc ascent was nevertheless exceptional. Painting at altitude required Hart Dyke to carry his equipment through demanding terrain and work within the narrow windows permitted by mountain conditions. On reaching the summit, he painted as the sun descended over the Alps, recreating an experience at the heart of Loppé’s 1873 expedition.
For William Mitchell, who accompanied Hart Dyke on the climb, the expedition created a tangible connection with the history of Alpine painting. The party left the summit shortly before 10pm and descended through the night to the Grands Mulets Hut. The resulting paintings and exhibition brought together mountaineering history, nineteenth-century Alpine art and contemporary landscape painting.
The project also demonstrated the documentary importance of landscape painting. Loppé’s nineteenth-century paintings preserve views of glaciers and Alpine terrain as he encountered them more than a century ago. When considered alongside Hart Dyke’s paintings of the same mountain, they provide a striking visual comparison between two periods in the history of Mont Blanc.
As The Guardian reported, Hart Dyke believes that landscape painting has particular relevance at a time of rapid environmental change. The mountains are not simply subjects for aesthetic contemplation: painting them requires close observation of landscapes that are themselves changing.
The exhibition therefore brought the work of Gabriel Loppé and James Hart Dyke into dialogue across 150 years. Both artists climbed high into the mountains with their painting materials; both worked directly from the Alpine landscape; and both recorded Mont Blanc as they encountered it in their own time.
Yet the differences between their paintings reveal a mountain transformed. The glaciers painted by Loppé have retreated, historic climbing routes have become more difficult and unstable, and sections of ice familiar to nineteenth-century mountaineers have disappeared.
Mont Blanc: The Summit Paintings was consequently both an artistic and mountaineering project and a visual record of environmental change in the European Alps. By following Gabriel Loppé’s 1873 ascent of Mont Blanc, James Hart Dyke connected contemporary British landscape painting with the history of the peintre-alpiniste, while documenting a high mountain environment undergoing profound change.
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