Albert Duplain
Born in 1890.
Died in 1978.
Swiss · Figurative landscape painting centred on Lake Geneva, the Lavaux, and the Swiss Alps.
From the Lavaux vineyards to the Valais peaks, Albert Duplain (1890–1978) explores a familiar geography of Swiss painting. His work can be discovered through named and recognisable places: Chexbres, Épesses, Lake Geneva, the Matterhorn and the surroundings of Zermatt. These motifs trace a passage between inhabited landscapes and high mountains.
The catalogues document in particular Vue de Chexbres, Lavaux (Epesses) and Vendanges en Lavaux. The latter title introduces human labour into the vineyard landscape. Other paintings bring the shores of Lake Geneva together with Chillon Castle and the Dents du Midi, or take as their subject the Maria zum Schnee chapel at Schwarzsee above Zermatt.
Through these juxtapositions, architecture appears as a point of reference within the natural expanse.
Oil painting on canvas is attested by several works, including Lavaux, canton de Vaud and Village de Lavaux, listed in the December 2015 catalogue of Genève Enchères. Art UK also records an Alpine scene in the collection of the Alpine Club.
Duplain’s personal trajectory remains little illuminated by the available sources. His paintings therefore offer the most direct way of approaching him: observing the place of a village, the delineation of a shore, the encounter between a building and the surrounding relief. Albert Duplain must be distinguished from Ami-Ferdinand Duplain, another Swiss painter whose subjects partly overlap with his.
The works by Albert Duplain presented by Swiss Art Gallery extend this artistic journey and take their place naturally within this corpus.
