Q131586149

Painted in 1883, this canvas belongs to Hodler's pre-Symbolist professional decade. He was thirty years old, a veteran of the Geneva art market, producing competent academic work while harboring more ambitious compositional goals that had not yet found their ultimate form. The early 1880s saw him completing the large multi-figure canvas The Students of Jena, which already showed his interest in group compositions organized around a shared gesture or posture. By 1883 he was also exploring still-life, portrait, and small landscape formats with equal technical care. The Kunsthaus Zürich's preservation of this work allows the full arc of Hodler's development to be traced: from this careful pre-Symbolist realism to the revolutionary compositions of the following decade.

A canvas of 1883 shows Hodler at peak academic competence: controlled glazing and opaque passages, careful tonal gradation, and an already characteristic firmness of outline. The palette is naturalistic but shows the warm-cool colour organisation that would become a deliberate structural tool. The compositional thinking is already more rigorous than simple genre practice demanded.