Mount Niesen seen from Heustrich

The Niesen is a real mountain south of Lake Thun, and it happens to rise in an almost perfect pyramid, which is exactly why Hodler kept coming back to it. In the summer of 1910 he painted three views of it from around Aeschi and Heustrich, and across his life he returned to the peak roughly ten times, treating it almost the way he treated a sitter for a portrait. He sharpens its two slopes into clean triangular edges and lets a soft, sourceless light rest on the rock. The valley below is kept almost bare, so that nothing competes with that single shape.