Painter of the Valais · École de Savièse
Sion, 1878–1940
The painter of alpine resilience: "the resignation and the energy of the Valais peasants in their unceasing struggle with nature" (Historical Dictionary of Switzerland).
The thesis
Raphy Dallèves (1878-1940) is the most singular of the Valais painters of the École de Savièse. His single subject: the people of the mountains, caught between melancholy and heroism. Trained in Paris (Académie Julian, then the École des Beaux-Arts, 1899-1905) and steeped in the Italian rooms of the Louvre, he built between 1901 and 1905 a "primitivist language" fusing the linear elegance of Art Nouveau with the tempera of the Quattrocento primitives. His old spinners, his costumed women of Évolène, his goats at dusk are not folklore: they are, in Buzzini's phrase, "the memorial and the armorial of a race."
"A modern primitive." Frédéric Elsig, 1999
A first clear, transparent manner drawn from watercolour.
A harder line, gold, echoes of the primitives: Botticelli, Fra Angelico.
Volumetric simplification, breadth, the calm of large compositions.
A stiffer, more Helvetic manner: Holbein replaces Italy.
Gallery
Photographs of the works, from the originals. See the catalogue →
The European context
The deliberate return to the "primitives" runs across turn-of-the-century Europe. Like the artist colonies of Barbizon, Pont-Aven or Worpswede, the École de Savièse fled industrial modernity for the rural world: Dallèves is its Swiss node, and the Valais its ideal land of a dreamed-of authenticity.
Life
Reception
On his death in 1940, the writer Maurice Zermatten saluted him as the faithful "document" of a peasant world. Reviewing Louis Buzzini's monograph (1941), the critic Grellet took up its phrase: the work is "the memorial and the armorial of a race." In the Annales valaisannes, the jurist and writer Jean Graven called him "the Valais painter par excellence" and likened his line to that of Hokusai, the Clouets and Holbein.
After the Second World War his work fell into relative oblivion until the 1999 retrospective at the Manoir de la Ville de Martigny, accompanied by Frédéric Elsig's monograph. In 2012-2013 he featured in the exhibition Welcome to Paradise! The École de Savièse at the Musée d'art du Valais.
The legacy
On his death in 1940, Dallèves left the bulk of his work (some two hundred pieces) to Sion and the Valais. That gift became the founding core of the Musée des beaux-arts de Sion, opened in 1947. Then the painter slipped, in Elsig's words, into "relative oblivion." 2028 marks 150 years since his birth. The moment to finish what was begun.
To give a modern primitive back the light he gave the Valais.
Stay informed
2028 marks 150 years since Raphy Dallèves was born. Leave your address to hear about exhibitions, publications and news around his work.
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Press & resources
A press kit, fact sheet, high-resolution images and the standard monograph are available.
The reference
The standard work remains the monograph by Frédéric Elsig, Raphy Dallèves. Un primitif moderne (Éditions du Verseau, Denges, 1999), which establishes the catalogue and the four-phase reading used here. It builds on the first monograph by Louis Buzzini (1941).
Contact
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References & authority records
SIKART · Historical Dictionary of Switzerland · Wikidata · Wikipédia (FR) · Wikipedia (DE) · VIAF · GND · ULAN (Getty) · RKDartists