The Rhone Glacier

A mighty stream of ice spills menacingly into the valley. It is the Rhône Glacier. In this painting by the Zurich artist Johann Heinrich Wüest, figures can be seen approaching the overwhelming natural spectacle with a mixture of awe and curiosity, keen to explore it further. While some walk towards it, others seek to capture it through painting or drawing. Yet they remain peripheral, their function to emphasize the relationships of scale in the picture.
The discovery of the Alps as subject for art was initially due less to artists than to writers. For Jacob Bodmer and his circle in Zurich, the Alps became synonymous with the sublimity of creation. Their preferred subject was the mountain ranges, their size dwarfing all human dimensions, glaciers of colossal extent and bottomless chasms. In this painting we encounter nature not only in the riven masses of ice but also in the dramatically clouded sky. Dark storm clouds tower up at the high horizon, leading our gaze upwards to lose itself in the tender blue of the sky.
The Enlightenment prompted a fundamental scientific reinterpretation of the natural environment, one that informs our thinking to this day. Research expeditions and the publication of numerous works on the subject bear witness to this new understanding. Yet against this backdrop, art also evolved a romanticizing exaggeration that not infrequently culminated in gushingly religious pathos. Today, the painting acquires an additional dimension through the retreat of the glaciers, previously perceived as an immutable element of the Swiss Alpine landscape.