Master Art

As an engineer by training, Fourcy had a successful career working for the French railway network, Compagnie Paris- Méditerranée Lyon- or PLM, before enlisting in the army. Despite losing an eye in WWII in 1940 and spending five years in a Rhenish prisoner of war camp, he was the longest active member of the Société des Peintres de Montagne, exhibiting there nearly every year from 1925 to 1990. Fourcy learnt to paint by himself and relied exclusively on a palette knife generously loaded with paint to recreate the seracs, glaciers and couloirs so familiar to him as a peintre-alpiniste and it took considerable skill to avoid over saturating the colour and tone. Fourcy’s experience from a lifetime’s climbing gave him an advantage in calculating the strength of shadows at altitude and especially in a late afternoon scene such as in this picture. His foregrounds tend to juxtapose the receding composition perfectly. The Aiguille du Chardonnet boasts an impressive north face which offers some challenging climbing routes, including the Migot Spur and at 3842 metres, the peak’s lower altitude in relation to its neighbouring mountains to the west means that it tends to have a lower footfall even in the busier Alpine seasons.