Lake Geneva with Savoyerbergen 1907

Ferdinand Hodler painted Lake Geneva with Savoyerbergen with oil on canvas. You can see Hodler was really trying to feel out the mountains, the water, the land and the sky. There is so much repetition in the ridgelines of the mountains, the ripples on the water, and the curves on the land, they all mirror each other. The physical texture of the paint feels so important here. It’s like Hodler is piling up strokes of paint to build a sort of echo of a landscape. I love the way he uses blue and green, mixing them together to suggest shadows, depth, and volume. The blue is so vibrant, particularly in the mountains, where it meets the snowy peaks. It's this contrast, this back and forth between the cool blues and whites, that gives the mountains their monumental presence. Hodler’s landscapes make me think of Cezanne, who also looked at the world and turned it into something solid, grounded and real.