Foreword by William Mitchell
MONT BLANC: The Summit Paintings is an exhibition of Mont Blanc paintings and sketches made whilst climbing Mont Blanc last summer. This book will serve as the exhibition catalogue and, at the same time, give an illustrated and meaningful account of a remarkable Alpine expedition, a feat of painting which took three years to plan and prepare for.
In July 2022, landscape painter James Hart Dyke and I climbed Mont Blanc via its rarely used north face to paint from the summit at sunset. As one of the pre-eminent mountain painters of his generation, James was accompanied by a retinue of guides, a cameraman and climbers as he ascended the Grands Mulets Route. This is a variation of the original one, l’ancien passage, taken by Jacques Balmat and Dr. Michel Paccard in 1786 on the historic first ascent of Mont Blanc but today it is largely abandoned due to climate change.
Under the watchful eye of the lead guide, Christophe Profit, one of France’s most revered mountaineers, James’s objective was to re-enact and emulate as closely as possible the conditions under which the French Alpine painter Gabriel Loppé (1825-1913) made a pair of remarkable Mont Blanc summit paintings at sunset in the summer of 1873. I have specialised in Gabriel Loppé’s Alpine paintings for over twenty years and in 2018 I wrote and published the first book in English about the painter.
Early in the morning on the 6th of August 1873 Gabriel Loppé and the distinguished writer and mountaineer Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) left Chamonix intent on climbing Mont Blanc in order to witness the setting sun from the summit. Accompanied by their guides, they arrived at the summit about an hour before sunset. In 1894, twenty-one years later, in one of the best known and loved books about the Alps, The Playground of Europe, Leslie Stephen wrote a riveting and detailed account of the experience entitled Sunset on Mont Blanc and, in his own words, considered it ‘the best thing that I ever wrote.’
About the Author
William Mitchell read Modern Languages at Durham University before beginning his career in the art business in Paris, where he spent two years with Eric Turquin’s leading cabinet d’expertise. He has since developed a particular interest in French, Swiss and German Romantic landscape painting and, over the past twenty-five years, has become an acknowledged specialist in paintings of the Alps.
William has sold paintings to institutions including the Louvre, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Clark Art Institute, and is Keeper of Pictures at the Alpine Club. His longstanding fascination with Alpine art has also shaped the gallery’s annual Peaks & Glaciers exhibitions, the 25th of which was held in 2026.
Central to William’s research has been the French painter and mountaineer Gabriel Loppé (1825-1913), whose work he has studied for more than three decades. In 2018 he wrote and published Gabriel Loppé, Peintre-Alpiniste, the first monograph in English devoted to the artist. It was this shared fascination with Loppé, Mont Blanc and the history of painting at altitude that ultimately led to the 2022 expedition with James Hart Dyke.
