Born in Berne in 1853, Ferdinand Hodler learned painting at the drawing school in Geneva between 1872 and 1877 under Barthélemy Menn, a former student of Ingres and close to Corot. He painted landscape, genre scenes and portraits, which he developed over the entire course of his career, particularly in the form of self-portraits.

In the 1880s, he joined the symbolist circles of Geneva, dominated at the time by intellectuals such as Wagner, Mallarmé and Verlaine. A realist, his art became progressively characterised by idealism and symbolism, with human destiny as his favourite theme.

In 1889-1890, La Nuit, a large picture worthy of history painting, revealed his obsession with death and his vision of existence. Noted by Rodin and defended by Puvis de Chavanne, whose concern for rhythm, line and flatness can also be discerned in this painting, the work won Hodler a gold medal at the World Fair in Paris in 1900.

From the early 1900s, Hodler received institutional orders for decorations in Switzerland and Germany. The German and Austrian secession movements found an echo of their own aesthetic research in his monumental compositions that expressed the quest for harmony between man and nature. The choreographies performed frequently evoked the contemporary ones of Loïe Fuller or Isadora Duncan.

Considered by Apollinaire as “the greatest contemporary Swiss artist”, it is no coincidence that he should also receive commissions for drawings to illustrate the first Swiss banknotes!

His landscapes, most of them of Swiss locations, were sketched on site and then recomposed in the studio, presenting “an enlarged, simplified nature clear of all insignificant details”, according to Hodler himself. Best known for his stylised views of the lake of Geneva, at his death in 1918 Hodler, an insatiable draughtsman, left more than 9000 drawings and nearly 12000 sketches in his notebooks.