Master Art

This striking landscape may be dated to the period of Chatelet’s travels around Switzerland in 1780-1781, in preparation for La Borde and Zurlauben’s Tableaux topographiques, pittoresques, physiques, historiques, moraux, politiques, littéraires de la Suisse. A stylistically comparable drawing of the waterfalls at Schaffhausen, in Switzerland near the German border, and drawn on the same deep blue paper, was formerly in the collection of John Gaines in Lexington, Kentucky, and was sold at auction in 2001. The present sheet may also be compared with a drawing of The Cascade at Tivoli in the Jeffrey Horvitz collection in Massachusetts, which is drawn in the same distinctive technique, as are two further studies of mountain views by the artist, on identical blue paper, in the same collection.