An unusual framing for an Alpine landscape, with the sky extending almost two-thirds of the way up. Half a century after his stay in Amsterdam, Wüest was still influenced by the paintings of the Dutchman Jacob Ruisdael and his cloud theatres In 1772, the Zurich-born artist travelled to the Rhone glacier at the request of the English naturalist, archaeologist and art collector John Strange. It was an opportunity to discover the high mountains and produce a series of sketches based on nature. His Glacier is painted with the same concern for topographical realism as an artist of the Enlightenment, but combined with the nascent Romanticism’s taste for the union of the idyllic and the grandiose, the picturesque and the sublime.
Under its immense sky, the mighty torrent of ice, bristling with seracs and dazzling in its bluish whiteness, spills out and threatens the valley in front of the tiny figures in the foreground. Dramatically diminished, this same Rhône glacier has now become an international icon of climate change.

Educated in his native Zurich, Wüest (1741-1821) spent a long time in the Netherlands, painting landscapes in the Dutch style of the Golden Age. He then adopted the spirit of the Enlightenment, with its new scientific, artistic and tourist approach to nature and its passion for the Alps. Along with Caspar Wolf and Füssli, he is one of Switzerland’s most important pre-romantic painters.

Johann Heinrich Wüest, The Rhone Glacier, circa 1775, 126 cm x 100 cm, Kunsthaus Zurich, donated by Heinrich Escher-Escher zum Wollenhof, 1877.