Timeline

1868

Born in Stampa

1933–1934

Died in Glion

Though much less well-known today than his sons Alberto and Diego, the painter and printmaker Giovanni Giacometti was one of the leading early modernist artists in Switzerland. Together with the painter Cuno Amiet, whom he had met at art school in Munich, Giacometti spent three years in Paris, studying at the Académie Julian. On their holidays, Amiet and Giacometti would return to Switzerland and work together, either at Amiet’s native Solothurn or in the Bregaglia (Bergell) valley, where the Giacometti family had made their home in the village of Stampa. Returning to Switzerland for good in 1892, Giacometti fell into something of an artistic depression that was not improved by a nine-month stay in Italy in 1893. In 1894, however, he visited Giovanni Segantini at Maloggia, and the elder artist encouraged him to persevere in his attempts to find an artistic mode of expression, and recommended in particular that Giacometti concentrate on painting the landscape and people of his native region. The two artists were to remain close until Segantini’s death in 1899, by which time Giacometti had begun to achieve some commercial success, exhibiting his work both in Switzerland and abroad. In 1898 he and Amiet had exhibited with Ferdinand Hodler at the Künstlerhaus in Zurich, and in later years Giacometti’s work was also shown in Basel and Bern, as well as in Germany, Austria, Italy and England. To the initial influence of Segantini’s divisionist technique were later added the loose brushwork and broad application of paint of the Fauves, as well as the particular inspiration of Van Gogh’s painting Les Deux Enfants, which Giacometti and Amiet copied at leisure after borrowing it from a Swiss collector in 1907.

Giacometti’s independent career was spent almost entirely in Switzerland, painting landscapes and genre scenes set in the Engadine and Bregaglia valleys in the southeastern part of the country. He was a remarkable colourist, and the paintings and watercolours he produced throughout his career display a love of sunlight and its effects. As he noted in the catalogue to an exhibition of his work in Basel in 1930, ‘In the confines – the narrow confines – of my mountains, these pictures were created. The struggle with light is the mainspring of my work...’