Bibliography
Oskar Bätschmann and Paul Müller, Ferdinand Hodler: Catalogue raisonné der Gemälde, 2 vol., Zurich, Swiss Institute for Art Research, Scheidegger & Spiess, 2008: n. 164.
Tobia Bezzola, Paul Lang, Paul Müller (ed.), Ferdinand Hodler, Le paysage, exh. cat. Geneva, Musée Rath, 2003-2004, Paris, Somogy et Genève, Musées d’art et d’histoire, 2003: 161-162, n. 6.
Ferdinand Hodler painted this landscape at the foot of the Salève, near Veyrier, in the countryside outside Geneva. This is the largest of some fifteen scenes of the marshland he worked on between 1888 and 1892. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Hodler rejected the artistic shorthand and pure colours of the Impressionists, preferring to harmonise tones without optical blending. His open-air painting is a relatively late example in the tradition of Barthélemy Menn and Camille Corot, though it does already gesture towards the more light-filled, architectural style he later developed in his Symbolist phase.
His clear foregrounding of the reeds reflects his interest in a rhythmical arrangement of motifs according to a higher principle of pattern. The vertical repetition of the stalks and the horizontal leaves illustrates nature’s hidden parallelism that Hodler set out to lay bare. The peak of the Salève is sidelined to the right, though great care has been taken to capture the limestone strata: Hodler had taken classes with the famous Genevan geologist Carl Vogt. The contrasts between the eternal mountain and the ephemeral reeds, between rocks and plants, and the interplay of correspondences between the two motifs make the composition powerful indeed.
This was the first of Hodler’s works to enter the museum’s collection, and the third of his paintings – and the first landscape – to be acquired by a public institution. Its purchase in 1894 heralded a new step in Hodler’s consecration as an artist. He was thirty-five: until then, his work had met with indifference, incomprehension, and outright hostility, and he was barely scraping a living from his art.