Albert Welti. Landscape in Pastel

Manipulating the pastel crayon, a dusty, porous material that can be used on paper to create painterly nuances or spontaneous improvisations, depending on the artist, requires the greatest skill; and yet the technique’s consummation is its union of drawing and painting.

A show of some fifty pastels aims to demonstrate the mature talent of Albert Welti (1862 - 1912) as a draughtsman and painter of landscapes, little masterpieces he called 'pastel nature sketches' in part to distinguish them from the paintings of ideas of his teacher Arnold Böcklin. Their intensive chromatic effects are the by-product of Welti’s enthusiasm for the virtually irrepressible interaction of light and the human eye.