Raphy Dallèves comes from a patrician Valais family. His father was State Chancellor, his mother, Marie Crot, daughter of the founder of the first law school in Valais. Encouraged very early by his teachers, Dallèves studied in Paris from 1899 to 1900 at the Académie Julian and from 1905 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

However, he remained very attached to his native region during his formative years in Paris and was one of the founders of the Savièse section of the Swiss Society of Sculptors and Painters in 1903. His meeting with the Vaudois painter Ernest Biéler, older than him, is important for his artistic development. He first stayed each year in Savièse, a political commune made up of several villages located on the mountainside ...