The 70 or so most beautiful and important paintings by Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) demonstrate the importance of landscape representation within the artistic development of this great Swiss painter. "A landscape must have character, express a passion or an emotion," Hodler once said. "Its character gives it its individuality. Figures or anecdotes not only add nothing, but weaken the gripping or direct emotional impact." This standard work on Hodler's landscapes shows how the painter finds his own monumentality in the depiction of his works from the late Romantic beginnings to his independent monumentality. In the two decades leading up to his death, he produced a landscape work that counts among the great original achievements of modern European painting. The book was first published in 2003 on the occasion of the exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich.