A Painter in the Darkness – Andrea Robbi

He was wealthy. A descendant of one of the confectioner families from Graubünden, who had attained prosperity abroad. He was gifted. Studied in Munich, Paris, became a state-of-the-art painter, knew Giovanni Segantini, Giovanni Giacometti, the great “painters of light”. Thus, he might have pursued a career, possessed the talent, the means. However, Andrea Robbi (1864-1945) withdrew at an early age – into the darkness.

Andrea Robbi was 34 years old when he gave up painting, and spent the rest of his days in his darkened parental home in Sils in the Engadin. At first, he lived with his mother, and after her death in 1907, he lived alone, leaving the house in Sils only at night, if at all. Sils, of all places. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), a regular guest in Sils, described the village as the "loveliest corner of the earth".

Andrea Robbi left behind little more than an early oeuvre. It includes landscape paintings – and a self-portrait depicting the painter's face in profile, with a suspicious yet proud expression. This picture, painted in landscape format, literally has a backstory: Andrea Robbi had previously used the same canvas in portrait format for a portrait of a young man. He did not finish either of the paintings, just as his life somewhat remained incomplete.