Many famous mountain paintings, from the Alps to China, chase one feeling: fear that turns into delight. Edmund Burke called it the sublime in 1757. Too close, danger is only terrible. Held at a safe distance, it becomes "a sort of delightful horror."
Each picture below answers one question: how does a flat surface make a mountain feel too big to take in?
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How These Were Chosen
Fame and influence came first. Each picture also had to do one of these things: show a mountain the painter knew firsthand, bend the real view in a way you can check, or leave painters a method. No artist appears twice. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog has its own page, so it isn't here.
12. Joseph Anton Koch, The Schmadribach Falls (1821 to 1822)
A white torrent drops through the middle of the canvas into a narrow gorge. Two snowy peaks stand high above it, half lost in cloud. At the bottom, a shepherd sits among his goats.
Joseph Anton Koch painted this version between 1821 and 1822, in Rome.
The place itself is real, though. The Schmadribach falls at the upper end of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, in the Swiss Alps.
Koch knew these mountains from the ground up. As a boy in the Tyrol, he herded animals and drew on the rock faces with charcoal from his fires.
Around 1794 he drew the falls on the spot. He later traced the sketch onto a fresh sheet and squared it off for transfer, a grid that let him copy the view at a larger size.
That sheet is now in the British Museum. Mark Evans, writing in the art magazine Apollo, sees two natural processes in it.
One is erosion, where the torrent tumbles over the cliff. The other is the water cycle, running from cloud to snow to river.
Koch builds the valley in bands, stacked up a tall canvas. The meadow lies flat at the bottom. Above it come a dark fir forest, then bare rock, then glacier ice.
In the real valley, the nearer ridges hide parts of the summits behind them. Koch lifts each peak clear of the one in front, so that every summit shows at once.
The Grosshorn stands on the left, the Breithorn on the right. Koch also gave the Grosshorn a cap of snow it does not have.
The water holds all those bands together as one valley, from the glacier ice down the falls and out across the meadow.
A sepia version of the view put a Judgment of Paris in the foreground. In that Greek myth, a shepherd prince has to choose the fairest of three goddesses.
In this canvas the gods are gone. Herdsmen tend their animals, and a hunter chases game along the slopes.
At a Glance
Artist: Joseph Anton Koch (1768 to 1839)
Painted: 1821 to 1822
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 131.8 × 110 cm (51.9 × 43.3 in)
Where to see it: Neue Pinakothek collection, Munich (shown in the Alte Pinakothek while the Neue Pinakothek is closed). An earlier version is in the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.
About This Painting
What are the Schmadribach Falls?
The Schmadribach Falls are a real waterfall in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland. They drop about 270 meters (885 feet) in several steps over limestone ledges. Two glaciers feed them, the Breithorn Glacier and the Schmadri Glacier.
How many versions of The Schmadribach Falls did Koch paint?
Koch painted The Schmadribach Falls twice in oil. The first, begun in 1805 and finished in 1811, is the Leipzig canvas, 122 × 92 cm (48 × 36.2 in). Before either one, Koch made a watercolor of the falls in 1794, now in the Kunstmuseum Basel.
What is Joseph Anton Koch's Heroic Landscape with Rainbow?
Heroic Landscape with Rainbow is an oil of 1805 in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. A shepherd plays music beside his flock under a rainbow that spans the whole scene. The Karlsruhe museum reads the rainbow as the biblical covenant between God and humankind.
11. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Winter Landscape in Moonlight (1919)
Snow fills a mountain valley in shades of blue, turquoise and lilac. Pink trees rise out of it, and a few snowbound houses sit among them. Orange clouds hang in a red sky.
Where the valley ends, the flat summit of the Tinzenhorn closes the view. The winter of 1919 found Ernst Ludwig Kirchner living in this valley near Davos, in the Swiss Alps.