Chexbres – Balcony of Lake Geneva

Nestled among the UNESCO World Heritage-listed vineyard terraces of Lavaux, opposite the Savoy Alps and about 200 meters above the shores of Lake Geneva, the winemaking village of Chexbres offers wonderful views that even Ferdinand Hodler could not resist—the variations of «Lake Geneva from Chexbres,» created around 1904/05 and 1911, rank among his most extensive landscape series.

Despite the numerous posters—which were not particularly innovative, but luminous and expressive, featuring large and carefully graduated fields of color—that Johann Emil Müller, born in Altstetten in 1885, created primarily for Western Swiss tourist offices, comparatively little is known about the trained painter. For a time he worked in the printing shop of Auguste Marsens in Lausanne, where he died in 1958 at the age of 73.