The Miller, his Son and the Donkey

Ferdinand Hodler's 1888 painting of the Miller, his Son, and the Donkey — based on the Aesop fable about the impossibility of pleasing everyone — dates from his early career, before the development of the Symbolist and Parallelism style that would make him famous. The fable-based subject reflects a strand of 19th-century moral-narrative painting that Hodler was exploring before his mature break with naturalism. The work is in the Museum of Art and History in Geneva, the city with which Hodler was most closely associated throughout his career.

Hodler's treatment of the fable subject draws on the naturalist tradition of figure-in-landscape painting. His handling at this period is still relatively conventional — solid figures, direct observation, controlled palette. The early work gives little indication of the formal radicalism of his later Parallelism and Symbolist paintings.