did a lil scavenger hunt to look for other postcards and painting records, and i think part of the reason that the building has been pictured so many times in so many ways is because of the mountains in the background?
these are all from oldthing.de, and rather than talking about the building they're all labeled with some version of "Piz Tremoggia," which is the mountain in the back with the diagonal rocks; sometimes they add "Fexgletscher."
(my german isn't good enough to translate the messages, but maybe someone out there can?)
i also found this postcard written in english, where the sender says that they're staying in a hotel in the valley.
there are also at least a few presumably plein air paintings from the area, like this one that was sold in italy recently and another from a local painter, alfred pellegrini
the engadin is always kind of an interesting area to me. there's some areas that are really well known (st. moritz, davos), but a lot of the other towns are super geographically isolated and yet depend on tourism money even they're often running, like, one small hotel in a town with a population of 15 that all shares one truck and the town has never been documented in any guidebook. they end up trafficking a lot in history and culture and then this general idea that it's like a romantic pastoral wonderland – so everything is "this building is from 1510 and still has the original nails, and nietzsche pet a goat here once, and also the air will definitely cure your consumption" repeated over and over. there's also historically a lot of interesting side dealing, like small towns will recruit artists from elsewhere because they can be an economic driver in a relatively self-contained studio space and don't need to go to town all the time for an office job. there's also some history around stuff like school ski camps; i know my mom's (normal ass swiss public) school had a deal in the 70s where they would basically just drop a bunch of kids and a few adults off with a horse and wagon at a guesthouse in the middle of nowhere and they would ski until someone picked them up lol. and for sure those kids were driving up the local postcard economy stocks (one convenience store 2 hrs hike away with a single rack of postcards) like crazyyy
given all that, i think it's possible that some of the paintings from the original post were done in Switzerland, either by working artists or hobby-seeking tourists, not necessarily off of a postcard? it is really funny that even now people keep taking basically the same picture of the same building with the same scenery, like this from alltrails:
the other thing i wonder though is whether some original version of The Painting ever ended up on an advertising postcard or a poster of some sort? i couldn't find one with that specific scene, but it jumped out to me as really the canonical composition that would have ended up on those types of things
these are just a couple postcards from Cailler Chocolate that ended up in the US at some point and all fit basically the same "small building building, green hill, big mountain" canon. i'm not super sure if these were printed for international markets by Cailler chocolate, or if they were just sold in CH as souvenirs? but the format was super popular for a long time, and it would make a lot of sense as an origin story for why a bunch of multiple painters might just have one specific view of a random little building in a little valley to work from
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