Lake Geneva

Hodler painted Lake Geneva repeatedly from his Geneva studio, regarding it as an inexhaustible subject for his theories about rhythmic symmetry and the underlying order of nature. By the first decade of the twentieth century he had moved decisively beyond his early Symbolist allegories into a mode of landscape that was at once Post-Impressionist in its heightened, non-naturalistic colour and rigorously personal in its compositional philosophy. The lake pictures distil his conviction that parallel repetition, in the bands of water, terrain and cloud, reveals a universal harmony concealed beneath surface appearance. These works brought him international recognition: he exhibited widely across Switzerland, Germany and France, and the Swiss Confederation increasingly treated him as the defining voice of Swiss national landscape painting. The saturated, non-local colour of works like this one also positioned him as a figure of genuine significance to younger central European painters grappling with the same questions Fauvism was raising in Paris at precisely the same moment.