1853-1918 Swiss Ferdinand Hodler Galleries Hodler was born in Berne and grew up in poverty. His father, Jean Hodler, made a meager living as a carpenter; his mother, Marguerite (n??e Neukomm), was from a peasant family. By the time Hodler was eight years old, he had lost his father and two younger brothers to tuberculosis. His mother remarried to a decorative painter, but in 1867 she too died of tuberculosis. Before he was ten, Hodler received training in decorative painting from his stepfather, and was subsequently sent to Thun to apprentice with a local painter, Ferdinand Sommer. Hodler's earliest works were conventional landscapes, which he sold in shops and to tourists. In 1871, at the age of 18, he traveled on foot to Geneva to start a career as a painter. The works of Hodler's early maturity consisted of landscapes, figure compositions and portraits, treated with a vigorous realism. He made a trip to Basel in 1875, where he studied the paintings of Hans Holbein??especially Dead Christ in the Tomb, which influenced Hodler's many treatments of the theme of death. In the last decade of the 19th century his work evolved to combine influences from several genres including symbolism and art nouveau. He developed a style which he called Parallelism, characterized by groupings of figures symmetrically arranged in poses suggesting ritual or dance. In 1884 Hodler met Augustine Dupin (1852?C1909), who became his companion and model for the next several years. Their son, Hector Hodler, was born in 1887. In 1889 Hodler married Bertha Stucki; they were divorced in 1891. Hodler's work in his final phase took on an expressionist aspect with strongly coloured and geometrical figures. Landscapes were pared down to essentials, sometimes consisting of a jagged wedge of land between water and sky. However, the most famous of Hodler's paintings portray scenes in which characters are engaged in everyday activities, such as the famous woodcutter (Der Holzfaller, Mus??e d'Orsay, Paris). This picture went on to appear on the back of the 50 Swiss Franc bank note issued by the Swiss National Bank. In 1898, Hodler married Berthe Jacques. In 1914 he condemned the German atrocities conducted using artillery at Rheims. In retaliation for this, German art museums excluded Hodler's work. In 1908 he met Valentine Gode-Darel, who became his mistress. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1913, and the many hours Hodler spent by her bedside resulted in a remarkable series of paintings documenting her disintegration. Her death in January 1915 affected Hodler greatly. He occupied himself with work; a series of about 20 introspective self-portraits date from 1916. By late 1917 his declining health led him to thoughts of suicide. He died on May 19, 1918 in Geneva leaving behind a number of unfinished works portraying the city.  Related Paintings of Ferdinand Hodler :. | Night | smarta | Am Fuss des Petit Saleve | Communication with the Infinite | Genfersee von Caux aus |
Related Artists:
CERUTI, Giacomo
Italian Painter, 1698-1767 Italian painter. He was one of a group of artists working in Bergamo and Brescia who observed reality with an unusual freshness and directness. He painted religious subjects and portraits but was most distinguished as a painter of genre and low-life scenes. These included many pictures of beggars and vagabonds ( pitocchi), hence his nickname 'il Pitocchetto'. He married in Milan in 1717 but settled in Brescia in 1721. In 1723 he received a horse in payment for three altarpieces and four frescoes for the parish church of Rino di Sonico; they were mediocre works executed in an unadventurous blend of Lombard and Venetian traditions derived from contemporary Venetian painters working in Brescia. Ceruti's early portraits and genre scenes are less conventional and more intensely felt; in 1724 he signed and dated the strikingly naturalistic portrait of Giovanni Maria Fenaroli
Wladislaw Podkowinski
Polish Painter, 1866-1895
Gabriel Jacques de Saint-Aubin
French Painter, 1724-1780,Draughtsman, etcher and painter, brother of (1) Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin. He studied with the painters Etienne Jeaurat and Hyacinthe Colin de Vermont, but failed three times to win the Prix de Rome (competition paintings, 1752-4; Paris, Louvre). He broke with the Academie Royale, preferring to support and exhibit at the Academie de St Luc. Although he continued to paint such pictures as a Street Show in Paris (c. 1760; London, N.G.; other examples in Rouen, Mus. B.-A.), he is best known as a draughtsman and etcher. He was a passionate and unconventional observer of the sights of the Paris streets and of the social scene. Dacier saw him as the 'man who drew at all times and in all places', and his contemporary Jean-Baptiste Greuze spoke of his 'priapism of draughtsmanship'. In his many drawings he combined pencil, black and red chalk, bistre, ink and watercolour to create dazzling spontaneous effects. He drew incidents that struck him as he wandered the streets, or entertainments that he attended. He recorded them, noting dates and times, in sketchbooks (e.g. Paris, Louvre and Stockholm, Nmus.) or sometimes in the margins and blank pages of printed books that he was carrying (such as a volume of the poems of Jean-Michel Sedaine, in the Mus. Cond?, Chantilly). These drawings of contemporary incidents include the Fire at the Foire Saint-Germain on the Night of 16-17 May 1762 (ex-David Weill priv. col.) and the Crowning of Voltaire at the Theetre-Franeais in 1778 (Paris, Louvre; see fig.). He went regularly to the Salon of the Academie Royale and to art sales, covering the margins and flyleaves of his sale catalogues and Salon livrets with tiny sketches of works of art and the passing scene. One hundred of these illustrated catalogues were among his effects when he died, and of these about a third survive. These include the livrets for the Salons of 1761, 1769 and 1777 (all Paris, Bib. N.), as well as the catalogues of the sales of Louis-Michel van Loo in 1772 and Charles Natoire in 1778 (both Paris, Bib. N.), and that of Pierre-Jean Mariette in 1775 (Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.). Together with his etchings and large watercolours (e.g. Paris, Louvre) of the Louvre's Salon Carre at the time of the exhibitions of 1753, 1767 and 1769,