Genfersee von Chexbres aus

Genfersee von Chexbres aus (Lake Geneva from Chexbres) by Hodler from 1904, held at the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, was painted from the village of Chexbres in the Lavaux wine-growing region above Vevey — a spectacular vantage point from which the lake and Alps open beneath the viewer in an enormous panoramic sweep. The Lavaux terraces, now a UNESCO World Heritage landscape, drop steeply from the village to the lakeside, and Hodler painted from this elevated position multiple times. From Chexbres, the lake appears as an immense mirror surface, the Alps as a distant wall of white and gray — the perfect subject for his Parallelism theory. This Lausanne museum holds one of the finest collections of Hodler's lake paintings.

The elevated viewpoint allows Hodler to show the lake in steep foreshortening, its surface appearing nearly flat and mirror-like from above. His treatment of the Savoy Alps on the far shore uses a cool blue-gray palette that contrasts with the warmer tones of the Lavaux landscape in the foreground.