Ferdinand Hodler

1853 - 1918 • Swiss • Painter • Symbolist

"The mission of the artist ... is to give expression to beauty, the external element of nature: to extract from nature essential beauty." - Ferdinand Hodler

In the early 1890s Hodler's fairly unimaginative work changed, showing a new affinity with the values of SYMBOLISM, its mysticism, and its synthetic style. Part of this change may be attributed to a vision he had when his son was born. He represents the event in Chosen One ( 1893) in which he painted his son as a new Christ child, naked in the Swiss landscape, accompanied by six plain but pleasant-faced angels. Their benevolent faces look like those of next-door neighbors, but their ordinariness is belied by the fact that they all levitate a foot or so above the earth. Hodler drew inspiration from Swiss history and the Swiss landscape. Though not all his subsequent work was so apparently Symbolist as Chosen One, he did exhibit in the SALON DE LA ROSE+ CROIX.