Albert Trachsel 1863-1929

Born in 1863 in Nidau, Albert Trachsel began his studies in architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, where he was a pupil of Barthélémy Menn. He continued his training at the Polytechnic School in Zurich before enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he settled in 1882. There, he became deeply involved in Symbolist circles, forming connections with Eugène Carrière, Paul Gauguin, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jean Moréas, and Paul Verlaine. From 1892, he participated in the first Salon de la Rose+Croix, exhibiting architectural drawings alongside Félix Vallotton and his friend Ferdinand Hodler.

In addition to his primarily graphic, idealist-inspired work, Trachsel contributed to the promotion of Symbolism through numerous critical essays, particularly on Swiss art. In 1896, he executed and completed the decoration of the Théâtre du Sapajou in Geneva, a gathering place for young artists during the Swiss National Exhibition. The following year, he compiled in the album Les Fêtes réelles a series of fantastic architectural drawings, influenced both by Symbolism and the utopian architecture of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Returning to Geneva in 1901, he abandoned architecture permanently to devote himself fully to painting, integrating his literary ambitions and spiritualist explorations. Trachsel undertook long walking journeys across Switzerland, producing watercolors of landscapes from the Bernese Oberland, Graubünden, and Ticino.

From 1905, alongside his work from nature, he spent nearly ten years developing a major pictorial cycle of “dream landscapes,” directly linked to his writing of poems, stories, and fantastic tales. With the outbreak of World War I, Trachsel restricted his output to watercolors of primarily Genevan landscapes, devoid of any fantastical elements. He died of a heart attack fifteen years later on the platform of Geneva station while on his way to the opening of the first exhibition dedicated to his complete oeuvre at the Kunsthalle in Bern.

The pastel we present illustrates the shift in Trachsel’s work around 1900, blending his landscape practice with a singular Symbolism. Two lovers, reclining in an elegant Nordic-style boat, engage in intimate exchanges, surrounded by flowers, in the middle of a lake at the foot of imposing mountains. In this strange composition, which harmonizes dream and reality, the idyllic foreground contrasts with the precise rendering of the contours and textures of the rocky peaks, freely observed by the artist during his studies en plein air in the Alps. Trachsel captures in strong contrasts the effects of light on the snow-capped heights, while a cumulus cloud in the background balances the mineral mass on the right-hand side.

Like Lamartine’s Lake, a hallmark of Romantic poetry where pious lovers drift beneath mountains, the artist seems to reflect on the passage of time, juxtaposing the fleeting nature of human emotion with the permanence of a natural setting that has accumulated its rocky elements over centuries. He makes skillful use of the pastel’s suggestive qualities to convey the evanescent nature of this imaginary scene, with the landscape itself appearing as a mirror of an inner world. These qualities, shared with his friend Hodler, firmly establish Trachsel’s singular place in early twentieth-century Swiss painting.