Landscape painting of the early twentieth century included individualists whose approach to the depiction of reflections on water departed from those of the past. This article looks at two very different artists from central Europe: Ferdinand Hodler with his Parallelism, and Gustav Klimt who mainly painted landscapes during his summer holidays.

Hodler often painted the same landscapes repeatedly, although not in the same way as Claude Monet’s formal series. His view At the Foot of Petit Salève from about 1893 breaks up the reflections of the golden trees with bands of black and purple that don’t appear to be correlated with those of the original image above.

In contrast, this view of Lake Thun with Symmetrical Reflection Before Sunrise from 1904 appears to be meticulously faithful to optical principles.

However, in 1908 when he was in pursuit of Parallelist ideals, he painted this Rhythmic Landscape on Lake Geneva. This was a second version of a view he had previously painted three years earlier, when he wrote “This is perhaps the landscape in which I applied my compositional principles most felicitously.” Most of his symmetry and rhythm is obvious; what may not be so apparent are the idiosyncratic reflections seen on the lake’s surface. The gaps in the train of cumulus clouds here become optically impossible dark blue pillars, responsible for much of the rhythm in the lower half of the painting.

In the last few months of his life, Hodler simplified reflections into bands of colour. Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the Morning Light (1918) has a much simpler structure, with the water, a band of reflections, the mass of the far shore and mountains merged, and the dawn sky. The dominant colour is the yellow to pale red of the sky and its reflection.

Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light (1918) is simplified further to the water coloured by the sky, a zone of blue reflections of the far bank, the merged distant shore and mountains, and the sky.

Gustav Klimt developed his approach to reflections during the summers he spent with his partner’s family on Lake Attersee, when he painted extensively using a telescope.

Schloß Kammer at Attersee (1910) is Klimt’s view across the lake of this manor house, with contrasting textures in foliage, walls and roofs. The reflections have lost the granular texture of the original image, giving them a glassy appearance, and appear optically faithful.

Castle with a Moat shows Unterach Manor on the Attersee Lake, and was probably painted in 1908 or 1909. It incorporates his almost Divisionist dotted foliage with contrasting smooth-textured walls of buildings, again softened in the reflected image. However, there’s some mismatch apparent in the hut on the water’s edge. Given the water between the motif and the artist, this must have been painted through a telescope, or possibly from a boat on the lake.

The same flattening is seen in his view of Malcesine on Lake Garda from 1913. The terraced properties running to the left of the centre of the painting are shown in a parallel projection, without any nearby vanishing point, which is again characteristic of a view through a telescope or similar optical instrument. However, the reflections owe more to Hodler’s Parallelism than they do to optics.

After Alexandre Calame’s views of Lake Geneva painted in the middle of the nineteenth century, the next great artist to devote as much attention to the lake was Ferdinand Hodler, a native of Bern, Switzerland. At the age of eighteen, Hodler had walked across the country to attend the Collège de Genève there, and train as a painter, initially by copying Calame’s paintings.

Hodler started painting a series of views from the north-eastern shore of Lake Geneva looking south, across to the major peaks of the Chablais Alps. He was to continue this series until his death twenty years later. Lake Geneva from Chexbres from about 1898 shows one of the first of these, painted near the village of Chexbres, between Lausanne and Montreux, in early winter.

Lake Geneva from Saint-Prex (1901) is another view across the lake, from a town to the west of Lausanne, looking south with a closer view of the peaks of the Chablais Alps. This appears to have been painted in the summer, with the trees in full leaf and a rich range of flowers. The clouds over the mountains are starting to become more organised in a regular rhythm, a trend that resulted in some of his most distinctive later landscapes.

The Grammont (1905) shows this mountain in the Chablais Alps, to the south of the eastern end of Lake Geneva, towards which many of Hodler’s favourite views over that lake were aimed. Again he uses a limited palette; the lake itself reminds me of Gustav Klimt’s wonderful paintings of Attersee from a few years earlier, although Hodler’s darker blue ripples quickly vanish as the lake recedes from the viewer.

The following year, he painted Landscape at Lake Geneva.

One of the clearest examples of Hodler’s distinctive Parallelist landscapes is his Rhythmic Landscape on Lake Geneva from 1908. This was a second version of a view he had previously painted in 1905, when he wrote “This is perhaps the landscape in which I applied my compositional principles most felicitously.”

Most of his symmetry and rhythm is obvious; what may not be so apparent are the idiosyncratic reflections seen on the lake’s surface. The gaps in the train of cumulus clouds here become dark blue pillars, which are optically impossible, but are responsible for much of the rhythm in the lower half of the painting.

In the final years of Hodler’s life he painted some of the most sublime landscapes of his career. During the winter of 1917-18, his health deteriorated, but he continued to paint from the window of his room in Geneva, completing more than eighteen views during those final months. Here are three examples.

In Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc by Morning Light (1918), one of the more complex paintings of this series, bands represent the lake shore, four different zones of the surface of the lake, the lowlands of the opposite bank, the mountain chains, and two zones of colour in the dawn sky. The lower section of the sky and the foreground shore echo in colour, and contrast in their pale lemon-orange with the blues of the other bands.

Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the Morning Light (1918) has a simpler structure, with the water, a band of reflections, the mass of the far shore and mountains merged, and the dawn sky. The dominant colour is the yellow to pale red of the dawn sky and its reflection.

Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light (1918) is also simpler in its structure, with the water coloured by the sky, a zone of blue reflections of the far bank, the merged distant shore and mountains, and the sky.

In Hodler’s ultimate and most sublime landscapes, he eliminated the unnecessary detail, stating just the elements of water, earth, air, and the fire of the rising sun, in their natural rhythm. On 19 May 1918, Hodler died in Geneva, at the age of 65.