Wanderer before the Matterhorn with Cloudy Sky

Wanderer before the Matterhorn with Cloudy Sky (Wanderer vor dem Wolken verhangenen Matterhorn) is a watercolour on thin card by the English-born German painter Edward Theodore Compton, signed and dated 1879 at lower right and measuring 37.3 × 26.9 cm; it was last recorded at auction in Munich in 2019.

Compton (1849–1921) was born in London and moved with his family to Germany in 1867. A family trip to the Bernese Oberland in 1868 turned him towards mountain painting, and from 1874 he lived at Feldafing on Lake Starnberg, travelling from there through the Alps and further afield. He was also a serious climber, credited with some 300 major ascents, 27 of them first ascents, and many of his watercolours and drawings appeared as illustrations in the publications of the German and Austrian Alpine Club.

The Matterhorn was a subject he painted more than once. In the same year he painted a much broader view of the mountain above a glacier, framed by pines, and the auction house Ketterer names a Matterhorn of 1880 among the works that made his reputation. This sheet is more intimate. The pyramid of the peak rises out of drifting cloud in the upper half, while a steep, sunlit slope of rock and scree fills the lower left. Picked out on the path is a tiny walker, who gives the scale of the mountain. Writers on Compton stress the role of light in his watercolours and his handling of air, mist and fog, and here most of the paper is given to cloud and haze.

The watercolour was offered at Neumeister in Munich on 3 July 2019 as lot 145 in auction 384, with an estimate of €1,200–1,500, and sold for €4,953 including buyer's premium. The catalogue noted slight browning of the sheet.