Over 220 paintings and watercolours representing mountain scenes are being exhibited at the Museum of Grenoble, a French alpine city, until June 1st 1998.
Painters seldom bothered to represent mountains in pictures though one must recall that Renaissance painters did so at one time or another, the best example being Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci with a mountainous landscape in the background of that painting. Works by Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, Cézanne, Gustave Doré, Eugène Delacroix, Adolf von Menzel, Alexandre Calame and even Kandinsky have been gathered in this exhibition to prove the importance of mountainous landscapes in painting and their impact over great masters.
However, the absence of American artists to the exception of Thomas Cole has certainly reduced the general scope of such exhibition whose organisers showed also some disregard for Chinese old masters who were certainly the first paint mountain scenes.