Grand Hotel Tremezzo hosts lakeside painting beneath autumn skies
As the palazzo closes its doors for the season, a final gathering brought guests and easels to the water's edge. Wrapped in blankets against the chill, artists captured the shifting light and distant mountains of Lake Como.
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The terrace at Grand Hotel Tremezzo became an open air studio on a quiet afternoon, the kind that arrives in autumn when the season turns reflective. Canvas after canvas sat on wooden easels, their pale surfaces waiting. Beyond them, Lake Como stretched grey and silver, mountains rising soft in the distance, their slopes dressed in the muted greens and earth tones of the turning year.
Guests wrapped themselves in blankets and settled into bentwood chairs, brushes in hand. Paint boxes lay open, their contents a jumble of primary colours and metallics: tubes of cadmium yellow, prussian blue, tubes of white and burnt sienna tumbling across wooden compartments. The light came low and diffuse, the kind that teaches you to see shadow and tone rather than vivid colour. One canvas caught a sweep of ochre across its surface; another held the ghost of a boat, rendered in graphite and watercolour wash, mountains rising behind it in layers of grey and gold.
The hotel’s white umbrellas, striped in orange and red, dotted the private beach below, their brightness a counterpoint to the quieter tones of the water and sky. It was the sort of moment the lake inspires: unhurried, reflective, the kind that settles into memory precisely because nothing demands urgency. The season was turning; the palazzo would soon rest. Yet Grand Hotel Tremezzo already looks to 2025, when the doors open again and new gatherings, new experiences and moments like this one await those who return to its terraces.
Imagery courtesy of Grand Hotel Tremezzo (@ghtlakecomo).