'Der Champfèrsee' by Ferdinand Hodler

Ferdinand Hodler (1853—1918) was one of the most important Swiss painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was orphaned at the age of 12 and studied first at Thun under an artist who painted landscapes for tourists. After 1872, however, he worked in a more congenial atmosphere at Geneva, under Barthélémy Men. By 1879, when Hodler settled in Geneva, he was producing massive, simplified portraits owing something to the French realist painter Gustave Courbet. By the mid-1880s, however, a tendency to self-conscious linear stylization was visible in his subject pictures, which dealt increasingly with the symbolism of youth and age, solitude, and contemplation, in such works as “Die Nacht” (1890; “The Night,” Kunstmuseum, Bern), which brought him acclaim throughout Europe.