1853-1918 Swiss Ferdinand Hodler Galleries Hodler was born in Berne and grew up in poverty. His father, Jean Hodler, made a meager living as a carpenter; his mother, Marguerite (n??e Neukomm), was from a peasant family. By the time Hodler was eight years old, he had lost his father and two younger brothers to tuberculosis. His mother remarried to a decorative painter, but in 1867 she too died of tuberculosis. Before he was ten, Hodler received training in decorative painting from his stepfather, and was subsequently sent to Thun to apprentice with a local painter, Ferdinand Sommer. Hodler's earliest works were conventional landscapes, which he sold in shops and to tourists. In 1871, at the age of 18, he traveled on foot to Geneva to start a career as a painter. The works of Hodler's early maturity consisted of landscapes, figure compositions and portraits, treated with a vigorous realism. He made a trip to Basel in 1875, where he studied the paintings of Hans Holbein??especially Dead Christ in the Tomb, which influenced Hodler's many treatments of the theme of death. In the last decade of the 19th century his work evolved to combine influences from several genres including symbolism and art nouveau. He developed a style which he called Parallelism, characterized by groupings of figures symmetrically arranged in poses suggesting ritual or dance. In 1884 Hodler met Augustine Dupin (1852?C1909), who became his companion and model for the next several years. Their son, Hector Hodler, was born in 1887. In 1889 Hodler married Bertha Stucki; they were divorced in 1891. 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. However, the most famous of Hodler's paintings portray scenes in which characters are engaged in everyday activities, such as the famous woodcutter (Der Holzfaller, Mus??e d'Orsay, Paris). This picture went on to appear on the back of the 50 Swiss Franc bank note issued by the Swiss National Bank. In 1898, Hodler married Berthe Jacques. In 1914 he condemned the German atrocities conducted using artillery at Rheims. In retaliation for this, German art museums excluded Hodler's work. In 1908 he met Valentine Gode-Darel, who became his mistress. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1913, and the many hours Hodler spent by her bedside resulted in a remarkable series of paintings documenting her disintegration. Her death in January 1915 affected Hodler greatly. He occupied himself with work; a series of about 20 introspective self-portraits date from 1916. By late 1917 his declining health led him to thoughts of suicide. He died on May 19, 1918 in Geneva leaving behind a number of unfinished works portraying the city.  Related Paintings of Ferdinand Hodler :. | mountain scene | Portrait of Louise-Delphine Duchosal | Day | Autumn Evening (mk09) | Study for Day (mk19) |
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Paul Raud
(22 October 1865 in Kirikukela, Viru-Jaagupi Parish C 22 November 1930 in Tallinn) was an Estonian painter. The twin brother of painter Kristjan Raud, he studied in Desseldorf beginning in 1886, becoming influenced by the work of Eduard Gebhardt. After his return to Estonia, he painted mainly portrait commissions for some time, before traveling with his brother and Amandus Adamson to the islands of Muhu and Pakri in 1896. His works of this period are reminiscent of those of Max Liebermann. In 1899 he returned to work in Germany, taking on some of the stylistic trappings of Impressionism; this, coupled with time spent working with Ilya Repin, influenced his later style. Later in his career, most especially during and after World War I, he began to teach, from 1915 working as a drawing instructor at the Tallinn Institute of Commerce and from 1923 at the State School of Industrial Art in Tallinn.
Karl Bodmer
Swiss Painter, 1809-1893,Swiss painter and graphic artist, active in the USA and France. His earliest exposure to art probably came from his uncle, the landscape painter and engraver Johann Jakob Meyer (1787-1858). When he was 22, Bodmer moved to Paris, where he studied art under Sebastien Cornu. In Paris he met his future patron, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, who was planning an ambitious scientific expedition to North America. Bodmer was engaged to accompany the expedition and to provide sketches of the American wilderness. After touring the East Coast, the party made their way westward via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to St Louis, MO, and in 1833 travelled up the Missouri River into country scarcely inhabited by white men. On the journey north to Ft MacKenzie, WY, Bodmer recorded the landscape and the groups of Indians they encountered. Having wintered in Ft Clark, ND, they returned to New York and then Europe in 1834.
Simon de Vos
Simon de Vos (Antwerp, 20 October 1603-15 October 1676, Antwerp) was a Flemish Baroque painter of genre and cabinet pictures. De Vos studied with Cornelis de Vos (1603-76), to whom he is not related, from 1615 until 1620. In 1620 he joined Antwerp's guild of St. Luke, and then he probably travelled to Rome where he came under the influence of the "low-life" genre paintings of the Bentvueghels and the bambocciate. A Caravaggesque influence, by way of the German painter Johann Liss active in Italy during the 1620s is discernible in De Vos's paintings from this time on. In contrast to the earlier "low-life" paintings, works from the late 1620s until around 1640, which were made after returning to Antwerp, are mostly small "merry company" and courtly genre scenes reminiscent of contemporary Dutch painters Dirck Hals and Pieter Codde. After 1640, De Vos turned away from genre scenes altogether and painted mostly small cabinet paintings of history subjects, influenced stylistically at first by Peter Paul Rubens and then increasingly by Anthony van Dyck. Examples include The Beheading of St. Paul (1648) in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. He married Catharina van Utrecht, the sister of Adriaen van Utrecht, in 1628.