A British landscape artist who recreated a climb made 150 years ago to document the impact of the climate crisis on western Europe’s highest mountain says what he found was so grim it reminded him of the “dark paintings” of Francisco de Goya.
French painter Gabriel Loppé’s artwork The Shadow of Mont Blanc at Sunset, painted from the summit in August 1873.
Photograph: Courtesy of John Mitchell Fine Paintings
James Hart Dyke ascended Mont Blanc’s ancien passage north face, the route taken in 1786 by the first climbers to reach the summit. It was also the same one taken in August 1873 by French painter Gabriel Loppé, whose climb inspired Hart Dyke’s own.
“Loppé was a legendary painter of the Alps, and the peaks he saw and captured on his canvases are now disappearing,” said Hart Dyke. “I wanted to capture them again, partly to show the damage that’s already been done, and partly to share one more glimpse of Europe’s best-known mountain range before it disappears for ever.”
Within the next few years, he said, no painter – or anyone else – will be able to make the climb. “The glaciers are melting so fast that as you cross, there’s a kind of rippling effect on the surface that makes it almost impossible to walk on.
“The bottoms of the glaciers have completely deteriorated: where Loppé saw pristine blue-white snow, I was looking at dirt and black ice.”…
After the truth-shower 