Q131586370

Painted in 1915, the year of Valentine Godé-Darel's death, this canvas belongs to one of the most emotionally charged periods in Hodler's biography. He had documented Valentine's dying in dozens of drawings and paintings of extraordinary directness, and the landscape canvases of the same year serve as an emotional counterpart — the enduring permanence of Swiss mountains and lake waters set against the unbearable impermanence of individual life. The 1915 landscapes are not escapist; they carry the weight of grief in their stripped-down forms and intensified colour. The Kunsthaus Zürich's holdings from this year allow the emotional range of Hodler's response to be fully appreciated: intimate death studies alongside these grand elemental landscapes, each mode addressing the same existential confrontation from a different angle.

The 1915 paint handling reflects the urgent, direct quality of the late works. Colour is intense and the application confident, with the structural clarity of Parallelism still governing compositional decisions while the execution feels emotionally immediate. The paint surface shows evidence of a working process that has shed academic inhibitions in favour of direct expressive statement.