The day after Valentine

A reclining woman extends across almost the entire width of the painting. Before becoming a museum subject, Valentine Godé-Darel is Ferdinand Hodler's partner and the mother of their daughter Paulette. From late 1913, the painter accompanies her illness, then her death, through drawing and painting. The Kunstmuseum Solothurn places its canvas among three paintings made the day after Valentine's death, which occurred on 25 January 1915.

Looking at the work — In the museum's reproduction, the very elongated format leaves little room above or below the body. Hands are joined on the abdomen; the head rests on a cushion to the right. Dark contours remain visible amid light touches. The pale background supplies almost no indication of the room. Painting thus concentrates our attention on a particular presence, without a setting that would draw our gaze away.

According to the Solothurn entry, the cycle comprises more than a hundred drawings and eighteen paintings. These numbers must not turn Valentine into a clinical file. Rather, they measure repeated attention before a situation that changes and whose outcome cannot be avoided. Before this single canvas, we do not know what each sitting meant to the two people. That part of their history must be left open.

The chronological framework nevertheless does not tell everything about this painting. The Musée d'Orsay holds a portrait of the sick Valentine dated 1914, made in oil and gouache on a small canvas. Its entry places it at the start of the series of the final weeks, between December 1914 and January 1915. From one painting to another, the relationship with the person continues, but the image held in Solothurn belongs to the time after her death. This difference cannot be erased by a stylistic comparison.

The formats themselves change how we encounter Valentine. In Paris, the canvas is less than fifty centimetres high and favours portraiture; in Solothurn, the horizontal expanse includes the whole body. These material facts are not secondary. They govern the distance from which we look and what painting lets us see. The small portrait asks us to approach; the long canvas obliges us to travel across an extended presence. Neither provides a complete account of this woman.

We might wish to explain the freedom of brushstrokes through Hodler's urgency or grief. The documents consulted do not permit us to describe each moment of work. Let the painted gestures therefore speak first as gestures of painting. The canvas preserves contours, revisions and lightly covered areas. It does not seek a uniform finish that would make all zones equivalent. This visible inequality brings us closer to the act of looking, without nevertheless permitting an imagined studio story.

The public life of these images brings another shift. The portrait of the sick woman is purchased in 1935 for the Musée du Jeu de Paume; Orsay presents it as the first Hodler work acquired by a French museum. Much later, paintings from the Rudolf Staechelin collection, including several images of Valentine, are shown again in Basel at the Fondation Beyeler in 2019. Works born within a private relationship thus become objects preserved, compared and transmitted by different institutions.

This transmission gives us a responsibility in looking. Before so testing a portrait, the desire to know can quickly become a way of explaining everything. Yet the first name, family connection, date and traces of paint already suffice to shift the encounter. Valentine cannot be reduced to illness, the painter's mourning or the painting's place within a career. The museum can help us recognise these dimensions together while keeping room for what the sources do not say.

The painting entered the museum through a donation in 1971. In this public space, an image born of an intimate relationship becomes a silent encounter for other eyes. It asks for few explanations and much restraint: recognise the woman represented, take time to look, then accept that painting neither consoles nor resolves everything.