although menn was trained as a history painter and had, during his last forty years, only taught figure drawing, it was he who challenged the swiss academic landscape tradition as early as 1845. at that time, the internationally successful alexandre calame and the somewhat older françois diday dominated swiss alpine painting with romantic, wild and fantastic mountain sceneries that have carefully composed foregrounds against which distant but highlighted mountain peaks are set under a pleasantly blue sky – or in a frightening storm. menn, however, when exhibiting his "wetterhorn from hasliberg" at the annual art exhibition in geneva, had not only ventured into the domain of his competitor calame, but had done so by applying the principles of plein-air-painting to an alpine landscape. 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.