On an early morning in December, 1987, with the distant Alpine peaks silhouetted against the golden light of dawn and a blue-gray mist ascending the hillside where Roseman stood at his easel, he painted December Morning - View from Chardonne Overlooking Lake Geneva (Matin de Décembre, vue de Chardonne sur le Lac Léman), (reproduced above). The breathtaking view from the village of Chardonne, on Mont-Pèlerin, takes in a panorama of the eastern region of the great lake with its lakeshore towns of Vevey, La Tour-de-Peilz, Clarens, and Montreux; the awesome peaks of the Dents du Midi; and an impressive range of the Savoy Alps.
A month after Roseman painted December Morning, the Chief Curator of the Museums of France, François Bergot, who praised the work as ''a very beautiful landscape,'' acquired the painting for the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, of which he was the Director. He had previously acquired the artist's work on the monastic life for the Rouen Museum, ''whose collections of paintings and drawings are among the most complete and most renowned in France,'' states the catalogue French Master Drawings from the Rouen Museum, 1981, by François Bergot and Pierre Rosenberg.[2] The acquisitions of Roseman's paintings and drawings for Rouen include the portrait Dom Henry, 1978, from the first year of the artist's travels to monasteries. Acquiring the portrait painting of the Benedictine monk, the Chief Curator of the Museums of France expressed "my admiration for this work imbued with insight and spirituality.'' (See Biography, Page 6, "The Monastic Life," fig. 3.)
In the nineteenth century, the English painter J. M. W. Turner made several excursions to Switzerland, as did the French artist Camille Corot. Both artists painted landscapes in the region of Lake Geneva. Gustave Courbet, who had been a member of the Paris Commune, took refuge from 1873 to 1877 in the lakeshore town of La Tour-de-Peilz, where he rented a fisherman's house that had been a former tavern called Bon-Port. Courbet's work included a number of landscapes of the Lake in the beautiful region of Lavaux, in Canton Vaud.
Spring Evening takes the viewer on a visual flight from the dark pines in the foreground; steep, wooded slopes; and green pastures to the undulating coastline far below, where lie Montreux, Clarens, La Tour-de-Peilz, and Vevey. Mont-Pèlerin is seen in the distance. On the horizon is the silhouette of the Jura Mountains bordering on France. With fine brushwork Roseman renders mist rising from the lake and the setting sun's reflection in the pale, blue-green water.
Among twentieth-century writers and their works associated with the region is F. Scott Fitzgerald, who stayed in hotels in Vevey and in the villages of Glion and Caux, above Montreux. Fitzgerald refers to "an emerald hillside" in describing a scene in Book II in Tender is the Night. In the nearby hamlet of Chamby, Ernest Hemingway resided in a brown house that is mentioned as a refuge for the narrator, Tenente, and his girlfriend Catherine in the final chapters of A Farewell to Arms.
Higher up the mountainsides above Montreux, narrow, winding roads ascend to steep Alpine pastures bordered by woodlands, as depicted in August Afternoon - A Pasture on the Edge of an Alpine Wood, 1991, (fig. 3). Roseman painted the beautiful landscape August Afternoon to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the founding of the Old Swiss Confederation, dating from August 1, 1291.
The northeastern shore of Lake Geneva and the Alpine pastureland inspired the literary imagination of a number of writers. Dostoevsky's older compatriot Nikolai Gogol had come to Vevey some thirty years before and there worked on writing his novel entitled Dead Souls, considered an outstanding achievement in nineteenth-century Russian literature. The English Romantic poet Lord Byron came to live in Switzerland in 1816 and composed his stirring, narrative poem The Prisoner of Chillon, following a visit to the medieval castle that dominates the water's edge, due east of Montreux. The American born author Henry James took up residence in Vevey at the Hôtel des Trois Couronnes, and the fine hotel, situated as the author notes "upon the edge of a remarkably blue lake,'' was a setting for his novel Daisy Miller, published in 1879.
In a pasture on a mountainside above Lake Geneva, Roseman painted a beautiful panorama of the great lake in the glow of an evening mist in spring. Spring Evening - View of Mont-Pèlerin and Lake Geneva (Soirée de printemps, vue du Mont Pèlerin et du lac de Genève), 1988, (fig. 2, below), entered the Musée des-Beaux-Arts, Rouen, that same year. Equally enamored of "this very beautiful landscape," the Chief Curator of the Museums of France acquired the painting as a companion work to December Morning, representing two times of the day traditionally devoted to prayer and meditation.
The northeastern region of Lake Geneva has been a creative milieu for generations of writers, artists, and composers. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevski, who came to Vevey in 1868, writes in correspondence to his niece: "The mountains, the water, the light - all is magic.''[3]
Drawings account for a great part of Roseman's oeuvre. Speaking about the importance of drawing, the artist acknowledges Giorgio Vasari: "The celebrated sixteenth-century Florentine architect, painter, and author of Lives of the Artists affirmed that drawing is the animating principle of the creative process.[7] Vasari, who was the first great collector of drawings, esteemed drawings for their inherent value."[8]
Before concentrating on The Rite of Spring, as Stravinsky explains in An Autobiography, the composer began "an orchestral piece in which the piano would play the most important part - a sort of Konzertstück.''[4] Stravinsky writes: "In composing the music, I had in mind a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life. . . . I struggled for hours while walking beside the Lake of Geneva to find a title which would express in a word the character of my music. . . . I had indeed found my title - Petroushka," recounts Stravinsky. The impresario of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghileff, visited Stravinsky at Clarens and with enthusiasm for the Konzertstück encouraged the composer to write a ballet on the theme of the clown puppet. Alexandre Benois, scenarist, artistic director, and cofounder of the Ballets Russes, collaborated with Stravinsky on the ballet Petrouchka, which became a great success and a classic in the modern dance repertory.[5]
"The morning sky was silver gray when I left the chalet in Chardonne," Roseman recounts. "I packed the car with my paint box, portable easel, panels, and travel bag of art supplies, as well as a thermos of hot coffee, and headed east towards Montreux, exited the highway, and started the long drive up the mountain . . . .'' The artist continues with his account of painting Spring Snowstorm:
7. The artist at his easel in an Alpine pasture above Lake Geneva, spring 1988. Roseman's paint box, placed on the crossbars of his portable easel, serves as a worktable for his brushes and jars of painting medium and turpentine. On the ground, by his side, are a shoulder bag of art supplies and boxes for transporting his panels and the finished paintings.
Le Grammont - View from La Tour-de-Peitz, 2015, is a marvelous drawing in chalks and pastels, (fig. 10). Le Grammont rises 2,172 meters, or more than 7,000 feet, above the southern shore of Lake Geneva. The calm lake, rendered with sweeping strokes of grays and gray-greens, is strongly contrasted by the soaring mountain mass in bistre, green-browns, gray-umber, and blue-blacks.
"The view from Chardonne, some 580 meters above sea level, inspired me to begin a series of landscape paintings in autumn 1987. For several years, I had been writing about my artwork and extensive travels with my partner Ronald Davis in monasteries in England, Ireland, and on the Continent during the late 1970's to early 1980's. In our move to the Lavaux region of Canton Vaud, we had found a modest chalet to rent in the vineyards in the village of Chardonne, where I continued my writing and research on monastic life. In a local bookstore I purchased the publication Vevey and its Surroundings and discovered with great interest the region's history of monasticism and viticulture.
At the opening night performance of the Paris Opéra Ballet's presentation of Stravinsky's Petrouchka on 9 February 1994, Roseman created the eloquent drawing of star dancer Charles Jude as Petrouchka, the tragic clown puppet with a soul, (fig. 6 above, right.) The drawing expresses the sympathetic character of Petrouchka. The artist renders a feeling of movement by the contrapposto position of the clown puppet turning to the left as his head turns towards the viewer's right and the expanse of pictorial space. In the artist's delineation of the figure, a treble clef appears in the flowing lines, as though the dancer were embracing the music in his arms. (See "Stanley Roseman and the Ballets Russes," Page 1.)
The eastern region of Lake Geneva was where Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky - great composers of ballets - lived and wrote in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and first quarter of the twentieth, respectively. Roseman's landscapes of Lake Geneva, which the artist painted in 1987 and 1988, foretold his work to come the following year. In 1989, Roseman received a prestigious invitation to draw the Dance at the Paris Opéra. The drawings of the Paris Opéra Ballet include Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker; and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Petrouchka.
The Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, acquired the beautiful drawing of Paris Opéra star dancer Elisabeth Platel, (fig. 5), in a pas de deux choreographed by Balanchine in 1960 to an extract from the third act of Swan Lake, which premiered in 1877. Roseman's swiftly flowing pencil lines capture on paper a stunning leap by the virtuosa ballerina in her variation in the jubilant Tchaikovsky - Pas de Deux. (See "On Drawing and the Dance" - Page 5.) (Drawings from Tchaikovsky's ballets and orchestral music are also presented throughout the website.)
1. Stanley Roseman - Dessins sur la Danse à l'Opéra de Paris - Drawings on the Dance at the Paris Opéra
(text in French and English), (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1996), p. 11.
2. François Bergot and Pierre Rosenberg, French Master Drawings from the Rouen Museum,
(Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1981), p. vii.
3. With sincere appreciation to the staff of the Montreux Archives for their kind assistance in providing texts compiled by Fédia Muller
on the correspondence of Fyodor Dostoevski and the journal Vibiscum, No. 6, 1996, on Nicolai Gogol in Vevey.
4. Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography, (London: Calder and Boyars, Ltd., 1975), p. 31.
5. Ibid., pp. 31, 32, 34.
6. Vevey and its Surroundings, French text: Jean Nicollier, translated by Andree Denham: (Neuchâtel, Editions du Griffon), p. 5.
7. Giorgio Vasari, Vasari on Technique, (New York: Dover, 1960), p. 205.
8. Nicolas Turner, Florentine Drawings of the sixteenth century, (London: British Museum, 1986), p. 189.
9. Stanley Roseman - Dessins sur la Danse à l'Opéra de Paris, p. 12.