Ferdinand Hodler

Ferdinand Hodler was born in Berne in 1853. He trained as a landscape painter with Ferdinand Sommer and then went to Geneva. There he was discovered by Barthélemy Menn, a student of Ingres, in 1872 and was trained by him until 1878. In 1881 Hodler helped work on Castres’ Bourbaki Panorama. His first single exhibition was held in Geneva in 1885 and his 1889 painting The Night was his first great success. By 1900, Hodler’s paintings had been shown at over 200 exhibitions, and at the Paris world exhibition that year he received a gold medal for three of his works. Hodler became known as one of Europe’s leading painters. In Switzerland, two banknotes were printed with images from his paintings and he was made an honorary citizen of Geneva in 1918, the year of his death. The first large retrospective of his work was held at the Kunsthaus Zurich just one year earlier, in 1917.

Posters by Ferdinand Hodler