GRAND MUVERAN PAINTED BY FERDINAND HODLER

FERDINAND HODLER (1853-1918) 

Le Grand Muveran (3,051m - 10,009 ft)
Switzerland

1. Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1912

2. Private collection, 1912

The mountain 

The Grand Muveran (3,051 m) is a Swiss summit, located on the border between Vaud and Valais canton. It is part of the range in the Bernese Alps and extends the Dents de Morcles to les Diablerets through the valley of Nant. This is the third highest peak in the canton of Vaud after Les Diablerets and Oldenhorn.  The Petit Muveran is a bit southwest and culminates at  (2,810m -9,21916 ft). 

The tips are easily recognizable from the north, the Grand Muveran forming a wide, solid wall and Little Muveran resembling a small tooth. They are visible from afar, the Chablais to the Lausanne area. Valais side, the Grand Muveran dominates Ovronnaz and can be seen from the plain to the height of Riddes.

The Grand Muveran was the subject of the  painting (above) by Ferdinand Hodler in 1912 and sold for a little over 1,5 million Swiss francs in 2003.

The Painter 
Ferdinand Hodler was one of the best-known Swiss painters of the 19th century. His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Later, he adopted a personal form of symbolism he called Parallelism.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century his work evolved to combine influences from several genres including Symbolism and Art Nouveau. In 1890 he completed Night, a work that marked Hodler's turn toward symbolist imagery. It depicts several recumbent figures, all of them relaxed in sleep except for an agitated man who is menaced by a figure shrouded in black, which Hodler intended as a symbol of death. Hodler developed a style he called "Parallelism" that emphasized the symmetry and rhythm he believed formed the basis of human society. In paintings such as The Chosen One, groupings of figures are symmetrically arranged in poses suggestive of ritual or dance.

Hodler painted number of large-scale historical paintings, often with patriotic themes. In 1897 he accepted a commission to paint a series of large frescoes for the Weapons Room of the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum in Zurich. The compositions he proposed, including The Battle of Marignan which depicted a battle that the Swiss lost, were controversial for their imagery and style, and Hodler was not permitted to execute the frescoes until 1900.

Hodler's work in his final phase took on an expressionist aspect with strongly coloured and geometrical figures. Landscapes were pared down to essentials, sometimes consisting of a jagged wedge of land between water and sky.