The Dents Blanches at Champéry in the Morning Sun

Hodler painted this in 1916, and by then his world had shrunk. In September 1914 he had put his name to a protest by Geneva citizens against the German shelling of Reims cathedral in France, and the reaction across the border was furious. He was thrown out of the German artists' associations and lost the market that had made him famous there. So in wartime he painted his own country instead. The Dents Blanches, the white teeth, are a row of limestone peaks on the frontier above Champéry in the Valais, and he caught them in the first morning sun, the rock warming from grey to pale gold while the lower slopes stay in shadow.