Prints and Drawings Room
View by appointment- Artist
- Samuel Hieronymous Grimm 1733–1794
- Medium
- Watercolour and graphite on paper
- Dimensions
- Support: 295 × 371 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased 1983
- Reference
- T03603
Catalogue entry
T03603 THE GLACIER OF SIMMENTHAL 1774
Watercolour on hand-made laid paper 11 5/8 × 14 5/8 (295 × 371)
Inscribed ‘S.H. Grimm 1774’ b.r.; inscribed on the back ‘The Glaciere of Simmenthal. | The borders of the distanz consist of a row of towering masses of pure Ice, a Glaciere extends itself from it on all sides, & evacuates its | Superfluities between two high Rocks into the Valley. On the left side of the picture the River Simmen tackes its origin & gives | the name to the valley’
Purchased (Grant-in-Aid) 1983
Prov: ...; Edward Basil Jupp (d.1877); Thomas William Waller; Elizabeth Stauffer Moore, by descent to Elizabeth Richardson Simmons, by whom sold Christie's 12 November 1968 (74) bt Agnew; purchased from Agnew by Walter Beck, bequeathed to his niece Margot Beck, by whom re-sold to Agnew, from whom bt by Tate Gallery
Exh: 110th Annual Exhibition of Watercolours and Drawings, Agnew 1983 (27)
Grimm exhibited ‘A Glaciere in Switzerland’ at the RA in 1774 (113) and ‘A View in the Alps, Switzerland; a stained drawing’ at the RA in 1775 (143). A native of Switzerland, Grimm frequently portrayed its glaciers, making it difficult to identify the two drawings exhibited at the RA. He designed some of the views of glaciers which illustrated G.S. Gruner, Die Eisgebirge des Schweizerlandes, 2 vols., 1760 (republished in French, 1770); but the view of Simmenthal included in the first volume of Gruner was engraved after Koch, not Grimm. Grimm also drew ‘Seven capital Views of Switzerland’ (mainly glaciers) for James Tobin; these are discussed by Rotha Mary Clay, Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, 1941, pp.5–10. Some of Grimm's drawings of glaciers are reproduced in Clay, pls.6, 8, 9 and 10 (between pp.8 and 9).
The glacier of Simmenthal is a fall of the Simme river which rises in the Bernese Alps and joins the Kander river, near Thun, in south-west central Switzerland.
This drawing was one of several hundred drawings by various artists bound in one of the two extra-illustrated series of volumes containing a complete collection of the exhibition catalogues of the Society of Artists of Great Britain and the Free Society of Artists, compiled by Edward Basil Jupp in 1871. The volumes were broken up for Christie's sale of 12 November 1968.
Published in:
The Tate Gallery 1982-84: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1986
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