Ferdinand Hodler

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Swiss artist who opened his own studio at age 28 after winning his first of many awards seven years earlier. In 1891, at age 38, he began a series of paintings on basic existence, love and death, faith and despair, God and grief. His career began at age nine when he began to help his dad in the sign-painting business. When he was 14, he was apprenticed to Ferdinand Sommer and learned to paint Swiss views for tourists. Five years later, he began copying at the museum where he was noticed by Barthelemy Menn and began studying with him. He was the eldest of six kids and the son of a carpenter. After his father died, his mother remarried and had three more kids; she died in 1867. Augustine Dupin, a model, was his mistress and together they had one son named Hector; she died of TB. He was first married to Berta Stucki in 1889; the marriage was short and only lasted two years. His second marriage was to Berthe Jacques in 1898. In his old age he had a daughter by a model; she was adopted by his wife. In 1917 he began to suffer from pulmonary edema and he died the following year. Link to Wikipedia biography