George Elbert Burr, born Monroe Falls, - Old Houses, Lausanne - 1899 - T-Shirt

A vertical pencil study looks straight up a steep old street in Lausanne, where gabled roofs, chimneys and a spire crowd the top of the sheet.

Visual Elements & Composition

The drawing is built in graphite grey on an off-white ground, with fine, economical line doing all the work. A corner building with tall, evenly spaced windows and a small dormer anchors the left, while a second row of houses rises on the right, their upper floors dotted with small windows. A lantern hangs on a wall at the centre, and two or three figures stand near the doorways at street level. The roofline is the heaviest passage, a dense climb of steep roofs, dormers and tall chimneys that ends in a slender spire with a rounded finial. The inscription Old houses, Lausanne and the date in March 1899 sit at the lower right.

Meaning & Symbolism

The sheet records the historic fabric of Lausanne, a city built on steep slopes above Lake Geneva, where older quarters stack and climb one house above another. The crowded roofs and lone figures give the scene its sense of age and close community, and the vertical format turns the hill itself into the subject. George Elbert Burr, an American artist born in Monroe Falls, Ohio, made many architectural and street studies during his European travels around 1900, and this drawing is one of them. Its careful handling of roofs, windows and doorways reflects the structural attention that runs through his studies of towns and cities of the period.

Looking Up the Street

A tee carries this view across the chest, so the wearer becomes the one looking up the hill, with the spire and rooftops rising toward the shoulders. The drawing reads as a single upward sweep, and the tee's centred print keeps that vertical pull in line with the body.