The Kien Valley with the Bluemlisalp Massif

Until 2022 no public collection in England owned a single painting by Ferdinand Hodler, the painter Switzerland counts as its own. Scotland had bought one in 1975. That year the National Gallery bought this canvas, and it was the first.

Hodler painted it in the summer of 1902 in the Bernese Oberland, looking up the Kiental, a side valley south of Lake Thun, towards the snow and rock of the Bluemlisalp. For a mountain view he chose a tall, narrow canvas, about a metre high and 70 centimetres wide, and the Gallery calls that upright format unique among his landscapes. It stretches the peaks upwards and lets the foothills interlock one behind another, in greens that turn a bright lime on the nearer slopes.

He said he was after the essential structure of a landscape, freed from every unimportant detail, and that a landscape must have a character and express a passion or an emotion. The clouds here are laid in as flat, ornamental shapes, and the Gallery sees Japanese woodblock prints behind them.