The following year, he entered the studio of the Swiss history painter Jean-Léonard Lugardon, who was a pupil of Baron Gros[1] and became acquainted with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

[5] When the latter decided to give up his studio to take the post as director of the French Academy in the Villa Medici in Rome, Menn returned to his grandparents in Coinsins before following his master in fall 1834.

In summer 1836, he visited the Campagna, Capri and Naples, where too he drew and painted landscapes directly from nature, and copied classical antiquities from Pompeii as well as Giovanni Bellini's Transfiguration in the Museo Borbonico.

When back in Rome, he produced history - and genre paintings, of which in 1837, he sent 'Solomon presented to Wisdom by his Parents' (Salomon présenté à la sagesse par son père et sa mère) to the annual Salon in Geneva.

Menn returned via Florence, Siena and Viterbo to Paris in late 1838, where he exhibited at the Salon from 1839 to 1843, and where he became the drawing master of Maurice Dudevant, the son of George Sand.

In this position, he trained two generations of Swiss painters, among them Eugène Burnand, Pierre Pignolat [fr], Edouard Vallet and Ferdinand Hodler, who reputedly said: ‘It is to him [Menn] that I owe everything’.

[6] Menn made a second voyage to Rome in 1852 and, in conjunction with Corot, Henri Baron (1816–1885), Armand Leleux [fr] (1818–1885) and François-Louis Français, decorated the large salon in Gruyères Castle that then belonged to the Bovy family.

The ‘photographic’ view point, the structure of the rock formations and the handling of light and colour make this picture the earliest modern landscape in Swiss art history.

‘In a bush I see everything’,[7] Menn used to say, capturing in his self-contained landscapes atmospheric changes of evening and morning hours, quiet harmonies of an unspoilt riverbank, a swampy plain or of an orchard in midday, casting them in sensitive tonal values and poetic tenderness.