Throughout the nineteenth century, many great artists were attracted to the mountains and valleys of Switzerland. One of the most important was Alexandre Calame (1810–1864), a native Swiss painter who grew up near Lake Geneva. Calame briefly trained with François Diday (1802–1877), but his reputation quickly surpassed that of his mentor and the two became rivals. Calame's paintings of the Swiss landscape are remarkably naturalistic depictions of lakes, high peaks, and rushing waterfalls, but at the same time, he considered them meditations on the theme of nature and the divine.

This exhibition, drawn from the extensive collection of Asbjorn R. Lunde, brings together for the first time in America a unique group of paintings and sketches by Calame and places them in the context of the nineteenth-century landscape tradition. Calame's works are shown alongside those of his precursors, his contemporaries, and his followers, offering a rare opportunity to explore the development of the often-overlooked yet significant Swiss school of landscape painting.

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