Q131586089

Dated to 1887, this canvas precedes Hodler's Symbolist breakthrough by several years and documents his late realist or transitional phase. He was in his mid-thirties, a skilled but not yet famous painter working steadily in Geneva, producing portraits, landscapes, and ambitious multi-figure compositions that had not yet found their distinctive formal language. The late 1880s were a period of searching: influences from Symbolist literature were beginning to reach him, and he was wrestling with how to go beyond observed reality toward a painting that could express philosophical and spiritual truths. The 1887 canvases show a technically accomplished painter whose stylistic identity was crystallizing but not yet resolved — a fascinating threshold state documented in the Kunsthaus Zürich's holdings.

The 1887 technique shows Hodler's academic foundations intact but beginning to strain against new ambitions. Tonal modelling remains conventional but outline quality is already firmer than realist norms. Colour choices show occasional departures from strict observationalism, hinting at the symbolic palette that would fully emerge in the following decade.