Ferdinand Hodler, 'Louis Montchal', 1885

In this arresting head-and-shoulders portrait of his friend Louis Montchal (1853–1927), a librarian from Geneva, Ferdinand Hodler focuses entirely on the sitter’s features. Nothing indicates Montchal’s social status, profession or everyday surroundings. Set against a neutral black background, without any illusion of depth, the sitter is captured in a carefully choreographed pose, his head turned slightly to the right and his gaze directed to the left. The tension created by these opposing movements lends the portrait a striking psychological intensity. This dramatic pose recalls both Gustave Courbet’s uncompromising realism and the emotionally charged self portraits of Arnold Böcklin. However, Montchal exercised a degree of agency over his own representation: ‘I am happy for you to paint the portrait as you propose,’ he wrote in a letter to Hodler.

Hodler would become the leading Swiss modernist painter around 1900. Born into poverty in 1853, he received a rudimentary artistic training in Bern, where he produced commercial souvenirs depicting Alpine landscapes in the style of Alexandre Calame.

In 1871, he walked some 150 kilometres to Geneva - then the artistic capital of Switzerland - without any contacts, financial resources or knowledge of French. Talented and ambitious, he nevertheless succeeded in positioning himself within the city’s progressive artistic circles. He soon became the protégé of Barthélémy Menn, professor of drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts de Genève and a friend of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

Like Hodler, Louis Montchal had studied under Menn. From 1885 onwards, both artist and sitter belonged to the Revue de Genève circle, whose members met every Thursday evening in Hodler’s studio in emulation of the Parisian salons. The ideas exchanged there, profoundly influenced by Symbolist art and poetry - not least the work of Verlaine and Mallarmé - laid the foundations for a distinctive Genevan avant-garde with Hodler at its centre. The Portrait of Louis Montchal is a testament to these formative years. In 1886, Montchal published an article on Hodler, describing him as ‘le plus entêté des martyrs de l’art’ (‘the most stubborn of the martyrs of art’). Two years later, he championed the artist’s - ultimately unsuccessful - appointment as lecturer in figure painting at the University of Geneva.

Fervently admired in Switzerland, almost as a matter of patriotic duty, Hodler remained little known beyond the country’s borders for much of the twentieth century. His international critical reassessment began in the 1970s. Today, alongside Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and other artists, Hodler is recognised as a central figure in a distinctly Northern European strand of modernism that developed largely independently of Paris.