Abstract
N THIS BRIEF NOTE I will reveal the identity of the actual model for the figure of the mountain guide in Balthus's large painting The Mountain (1937) (Figure i). Many years ago I rashly related this figure to one by an obscure eighteenth-century Swiss painter whose work Balthus had copied, to which it bears only a superficial resemblance; probably I was seduced by the fact that both men are shown smoking pipes.' Balthus himself regarded The Mountain as a tableau clef.2 He displayed in the painting, his largest to that date, a rich brew of references-veiled ones with regard to figures taken from his own life, transparent ones with regard to figures borrowed from the painters he admired. In the picture's subtitle-it was exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1939 with the label Summer: the first of four panels depicting the seasons-Balthus paid homage to Poussin's famous allegorical landscape cycle of the Four Seasons (1660-64) .3 The overall composition of the painting was, however, based on Courbet's Young Women from the Village (1852; inv. 40.1754) in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Mountain presents an imaginary plateau at the top of the Niederhorn, a mountain in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland. Having taken a cable lift to the top of the mountain in the summer of 1980, I can confirm that Balthus's landscape is composed of real, though transformed, elements, as well as invented ones. All the mountains can be identified, from the Sigriswiler Rothorn on the left to the Burgfeld Stand on the right, across the deep valley of theJustistal, the actual width of which has been suppressed. At the foot of the Niederhorn, out of view and a day's hike away, lies Beatenberg, the quaint Swiss village above Lake Thun where Balthus spent several of the summers and autumns of his youth, between 1922 and 1927. As I have written elsewhere in greater detail, in the pose of the sturdy sleeping Wandervogel (Figure 2) Balthus continued his reference to Poussin by evoking
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