Robert, Robert B. and Robertson: three generations of Käppelis. The “progenitor”, a leading businessman with unbridled obsessions, including making watercolours. This fervour seems to be in the genetic makeup, and involves a fixation on drawing in the broadest sense. Another passion is nature, particularly the alpine world. Meantime both father and son are addicted to mountains; they are involved in joint projects with Davos as their base camp. But the two younger family members are neither small masters nor vedutists; they internalise their experience of nature, condensing it to its core, its existential cipher. Theirs is a pictorial idiom that evokes both miracles and magic, that encapsulates contemplation and absorption.

A technical mastery is coupled here with the endeavour to get closer to the essence of both the small and large, the mighty and the sublime. Natural landscape as full of promise, to be marvelled at in Schoenthal, the “beautiful valley”. G.M.