Emotion

Hodler married Berthe Jacques in 1898, and two years later he stood her barefoot in a green meadow in a long pale blue dress. Her hands rest on her chest like a dancer's, her face turns away in profile, and pink flowers rise out of the grass around her. At first the picture was simply called Woman in a Flowery Meadow. Later it was renamed Emotion, and with that one word a portrait of his wife became the image of a feeling. Vienna saw it at the Secession in the winter of 1903 to 1904. It later belonged to the Viennese collector Carl Reininghaus, who for some years also owned Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, and he sold it to the state gallery in 1918, the year Hodler died.