Around the turn of the century, Giovanni Giacometti reached a decisive point in his life and art. His ‘Panorama in Bregaglia’, painted around 1902, belongs to this period of search and discovery. After years of uncertainty and struggle for recognition, he found in the mountains of the Grisons the landscape that would become both his central subject and the spiritual resonance chamber of his art. His friendship with Giovanni Segantini profoundly influenced this new direction. When Segantini planned a monumental Alpine panorama for the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, Giacometti accompanied him on a trek through the Engadine, from Maloja via Zuoz to the Diavolezza. Along the way, he produced sketches and colour studies exploring light, atmosphere and space.

The project remained unfinished; Segantini instead focused on his famous Alpine triptych. For Giacometti, however, the journey became an artistic point of departure. Drawing on the studies made during that ramble, he received his first major commission in 1898: a four-part Engadine panorama for Anna von Planta in St Moritz-Bad. The success of this work brought him wider recognition and further commissions, including for the Maloja Palace Hotel and for postcards that, though born of necessity, helped him refine a freer pictorial language.

The deaths of both Segantini and his own father soon after 1899 deeply affected him, and led to an inner reorientation. Under the influence of Vincent van Gogh and Jugendstil, as well as through exchanges with Cuno Amiet, Ferdinand Hodler and the collector Oskar Miller, Giacometti developed a luminous, rhythmically structured style in which observation and emotion become one. In ‘Panorama in Bregaglia’, he transforms the landscape into a spiritual vision: sky, earth and light merge in harmonious unity, dissolving the boundaries between perception and feeling. For Giacometti, light was a ‘bearer of the spiritual’, penetrating form and at the same time transcending it. The result is a landscape that becomes a metaphor of the soul – a transfigured reality that remains uniquely his.

Ferdinand Hodler’s ‘The Petit Salève’, thought lost until it was rediscovered in 2008, shows the mountain in its full, pyramidal form. A diagonal stream echoes the strata of the rock, while precisely rendered grasses and trees in the foreground contrast with softly modelled meadows, creating striking depth. The work exemplifies Hodler’s synthesis of natural observation and formal clarity. This synthesis of actual landscape and inner order characterises his work around 1890.

In 1910 Ferdinand Hodler, at the height of his artistic career, met the Italian stage artist Giulia Leonardi in a Geneva coffee house. Leonardi would become the subject of one of the artist’s most fascinating portrait series. Hodler made numerous portraits of Leonardi with varying expressions. Many of them are bust portraits, including profile views such as the present painting, which has been in private ownership for a century.