Portrait of Louis Montchal

In 1885 Hodler was in his early thirties, poor, and still fighting for a place in Geneva. That year a group of young writers and artists began meeting in his studio on Thursday evenings. They were the circle of the Revue de Genève, they read the new poetry of Verlaine and Mallarmé, and Hodler was their centre.

Louis Montchal, a Geneva librarian his own age who had studied drawing under the same teacher, Barthélemy Menn, was one of them. He was also one of the first to take up Hodler's cause in print. In an article of 1886 he called him the most stubborn of art's martyrs, and in 1888 he argued, without success, for Hodler to be given a teaching post at the University of Geneva. Before the portrait was made he wrote to the painter that he was happy for it to be painted as Hodler proposed.

What Hodler proposed was severe. Nothing tells us what the man did or how he lived, only his head and shoulders against black. The picture came to the National Gallery in 2026, a gift from the Barrett Collection. Montchal's head turns slightly one way while his eyes go the other.