Franz Schrader, the artist who revealed the beauty of the Pyrenees

There are encounters that turn your life upside down. That of Franz Schrader with the Pyrenees was love at first sight. In August 1866, on vacation in Pau (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), the 22-year-old from Bordeaux opened his bedroom window one morning and was struck by the panorama. “When a mountain has captured your heart, it is a true passion; everything comes from it and everything leads back to it,” he wrote later.

Thanks to a donation of 475 pieces from Luc Chardronnet, his great-grandson, the Pyrenean Museum of Lourdes (Hautes-Pyrénées) designed the exhibition “Franz Schrader, the sublime mountain”. Through sketchbooks and watercolors of remarkable finesse, pictorial works and maps, the establishment brilliantly retraces the journey of an autodidact driven by the desire to transmit his knowledge as much as his wonder. Because Franz Schrader was not content with examining, recounting and measuring the Pyrenees. He represented them. The care he took to capture the play of light from the peaks even earned him the nickname “Corot of the mountain”.

A sanctuary to protect

Founder in 1898 of the Society of Mountain Painters, he was also one of the first to deplore the ravages of tourism. “It was enough for men to come in slightly greater numbers to admire virgin nature for destruction and hideous development to immediately penetrate with them,” he wrote during a stay in the Ordesa Valley in 1913.

Echoing his works, he pleaded to protect the highest peaks, “holy places where we will look at the infinite and the Eternal face to face”. He himself was the first, in 1878, to climb one of these highest peaks, the Grand Batchimale, also called Schrader Peak, which rises to 3174 m on the Franco-Spanish border. As a final link with his beloved Pyrenees, Franz Schrader rests at the foot of the Gavarnie cirque, finding his eternity in the landscape that he had sublimated.

An exceptional collection

On the heights of Lourdes, in the heart of the imposing medieval castle remodeled by Vauban in the 17th century, nestles the Pyrenean Museum. Founded in 1921, from their collection, by Margalide and Louis Le Bondidier, a couple from Lorraine who fell in love with the region, it houses, to date, more than 15,000 objects – costumes, furniture, utensils – and 20,000 books and periodicals which tell the story of daily life in the Pyrenees and its developments over three centuries. It also offers magnificent views of the city, the sanctuary and the surrounding mountains.