Alpine landscape

The alpine landscape pictured by Nicholas Chevalier in this painting is devoid of human presence. The foreground is in shadow, our eye drawn to the majesty of the mountains, touched with snow and suffused with the rosy glow of a rising or setting sun. The artist obeys the rules of composing a landscape within the romantic picturesque tradition. There is a sense of beauty in the landscape, but also a sense of inhabitability, that these mountains, and that valley would not lend themselves to settlement, but instead invoke a feeling of awe in the viewer.

Nicholas Chevalier is a significant figure in the histories of colonial art in Australia and New Zealand, and was also, as Tony Mackle writes in Arts Te Papa, a ‘rather glamorous’ one. Of Swiss and Russian descent, he had travelled widely in Europe and studied at Lausanne, Rome and in London before embracing adventure in the Antipodes, arriving in Melbourne, Australia in December 1854. There, Chevalier was a founding member of the Victoria Academy of Art along with William Strutt and Eugene von Guerard. He explored the landscapes of Australia, often in the company of other artists as well as scientist-explorers, and was commissioned to produce a series of views in New Zealand by the Canterbury and Otago provincial councils in the mid-1860s. While the exact location of this painting is unknown, it is signed and dated ‘N. Chevalier 1861’, the date suggesting it is based on a view in Australia.