Art: PICTURE HOUSES

In the Bavarian Alps, housepainting is an ancient and honorable art. In the 14th to 18th centuries, most buildings of any account were decorated with high, wide & handsome representations of saints (and, occasionally, sinner: These paintings, done in weatherproof fresco and retouched every 50 years so, still make scores of Bavarian streets look like open-air picture galleries. Today the art of housepainting is enjoying a boom, thanks largely to the efforts and skill of a Garmisch-Partenkirchen painter named Heinrich Bickel.

A stocky, dedicated little artist with an iron-grey mustache and invariably dressed in traditional Bavarian leather shorts, Bickel took up wall-painting when an antique dealer gave him the job of repainting a house to make look old. In an 18th century manuscript, Bickel found a formula for fresco painting: mortar made half & half of fine sand and chalk, laid on while wet with five simple “earth” colors. Taking his style from the baroque masters (because they specialized in “free and large” art), he achieved such appealing results that he has been swamped with commissions ever since—and so have a number of other Bavarian fresco painters.