Les Buveurs

Ferdinand Hodler's Les Buveurs (The Drinkers, 1886) is an early figure composition from the Swiss painter who would achieve fame with The Night of 1889 and subsequent large Parallelism paintings. This group of drinkers anticipates his later interest in the repetition of figure types and the symbolic arrangement of figures within a composition. Unlike The Night's existential gravity, the drinking scene has a more everyday social character — the communal ritual of sharing a drink treated with the formal organization that was becoming Hodler's compositional approach.

Hodler renders the drinking group with the formal organization that characterizes all his mature work: figures arranged with deliberate attention to their rhythmic relationship rather than casual naturalism. His palette in this pre-Parallelism work is still more naturalistically varied than his late work but already shows the tendency toward simplified, clearly stated color areas. The figures' relationship — the shared activity of drinking — is conveyed through consistent formal arrangement.