Foreword by William Mitchell
This catalogue was compiled to accompany an exhibition of over thirty oil paintings and sketches by James Hart Dyke, made to commemorate a remarkable series of first ascents by the Victorian artist-turned-mountaineer, Edward Whymper (1840–1911).
One hundred and fifty years ago, in 1865, Whymper became the first person to climb the Matterhorn; a triumph that concluded an extraordinary career as the most courageous and determined mountaineer of his generation. In fact, it has been widely suggested that Whymper was a generation ahead of his peers in terms of what he accomplished in the Alps. And he had done it all by the time he was twenty-five years old. This summer the narrative landscapist, James Hart Dyke, spent his own ‘season’ in the Alps. For over two weeks in August he trekked and climbed, retracing where possible Whymper’s footsteps.
Over a period of thirty-one days in June and July 1865, Whymper and his guides climbed five mountains and crossed eleven passes. Four of those summits were first ascents including the Grandes Jorasses and the Aiguille Verte. He ascended just over 100,000 feet in the process and covered the same distance going down. After a string of successes the summer before, Whymper had devised a gruelling campaign for the following climbing season: he intended to scale all the significant unclimbed peaks, and had his sights principally on the Matterhorn. He had failed to climb it eight times since 1861 despite having never seen a mountain, let alone set foot on one, before 1860.
Whymper came from a family of artists who ran a wood engraving business. He too was apprenticed as an engraver although by the time he became proficient – which he soon did – technical advances in printing methods began to supersede this craft. As a young man he went on enormous, solitary walks covering sometimes as much as forty miles or more a day and yearned to be an explorer. At the time he didn’t realise it but his chance to fulfil part of his dreams came in 1860 when he was only twenty years old: the London publishers, Longman, commissioned Whymper to produce a volume of Alpine scenery. But once he had arrived, instead of being satisfied with recording what he saw, he wanted to climb and conquer. Neither a sentimentalist nor fearful, Whymper was an unashamed ‘peak bagger’: in July 1860 he made the following observation in his diary in Zermatt: ‘Saw of course the Matterhorn repeatedly; what precious stuff Ruskin has written about this, as well as many other things. When one has a fair view of the mountain, as I had, it may be compared to a sugar loaf set up on a table; the sugar loaf should have its head knocked on one side. Grand it is, but beautiful I think it is not.’ (from E. Whymper, 1871 Scrambles in the Alps).
Edward Whymper, circa 1870
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.
