Portrait of Louis Montchal

Artist: Ferdinand Hodler (Swiss, 1853 - 1918)

Original Dimensions: 19 1/2" x 17 1/2"

Location: National Gallery of Art, London

About Artwork: (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. 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." - (National Gallery of Art, London)