Baum am Brienzersee vom Bödeli aus

The landscape oeuvre of Ferdinand Hodler (1853 in Bern – 1918 in Geneva) comprises over seven hundred paintings, including numerous depictions of forests, lakes and mountain peaks. There are often several versions of the same subject, such as Lake Thun with the Stockhorn mountain range. The depiction of individual trees is also part of Hodler's repertoire. The painter liked to refer to his tree pictures as ‘portraits’,[1] i.e. as individualised depictions. We are also dealing with a painting of this type in ‘Tree on Lake Brienz from the Bödeli’. However, this subject remains unique in the artist's extensive oeuvre. A deciduous tree with a magnificent crown stands in a lush meadow on the shore of Lake Brienz. The bushes in the foreground almost completely conceal its trunk. The church of Ringgenberg and the mountain range towards Niederried near Interlaken can be seen on the left on the other shore. Hodler's location was on the so-called Bödeli, the alluvial plain between Lakes Thun and Brienz, in Bönigen, at the southern end of Lake Brienz. Hodler arranged the painting in such a way that the centre of the tree with its spherical crown almost coincides with the centre of the picture. The composition thus appears symmetrical without being monotonous. The picture is dynamised by the sloping mountain range to the right, the unevenly distributed bushes in the foreground and the clouds in the sky. Hodler thus lives up to his principle of parallelism, with which he attempted to bring order and unity to the chaotic and random nature by means of repeated forms and colours and a symmetrical arrangement. He saw it as the artist's task to ‘express the eternal element of nature.’[2] While earlier tree paintings show far more of the surrounding landscape, after 1900 the artist increasingly isolated the trees and heightened them with a wreath of clouds. This gave them a symbolic character. In addition to oil paints, Hodler also used oil colour pencils to complete the painting. In 1902, the so-called ‘Raffaëlli oil colour pencils’ came onto the market. The colour paste in these was not preserved in tube form, but in pencil form. This colour material allowed Hodler to add colour accents, but also to subsequently rework his paintings, as its use can usually be seen on the last layers of paint applied.[3] In the tree painting from Bödeli, Hodler is likely to have used the oil paint sticks – with the exception of the sky – as accents distributed over the entire surface of the painting. Around 1906, Hodler was one of the most respected and progressive painters in Europe. In 1904 he celebrated his international breakthrough at the Secession exhibition in Vienna and the following year an entire room was dedicated to him at the Berlin Secession. His professional satisfaction seems to be reflected in the cheerful picture with the tree in all its splendour. [1] Bätschmann/Müller 2008 (see note 1), p. 3; Loosli 1921-1924 (see note 1), vol. 4 (1924), p. 299. Oskar Bätschmann and Paul Müller, ‘Das Landschaftswerk von Ferdinand Hodler’, in: this, Ferdinand Hodler. Catalogue raisonné der Gemälde, vol. 1: Die Landschaften, with contributions by Regula Bolleter, Monika Brunner, Matthias Fischer, Matthias Oberli, Zurich 2008, pp. 26-27; Charles A. Loosli, Ferdinand Hodler. Leben, Werk und Nachlass, 4 vols., Bern 1921-1924, vol. 2 (1922), pp. 64-65. [2] Bätschmann/Müller 2008 (see note 1), p. 3; Loosli 1921-1924 (see note 1), vol. 4 (1924), p. 299. [3] Karoline Beltinger, ‘Bemerkungen zu Ferdinand Hodler Malfarbengebrauch’, in: this. (ed.), Kunsttechnologische Forschungen zur Malerei von Ferdinand Hodler, Zurich 2007, pp. 151-162, here p. 156. Source