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| Ferdinand Hodler Self Portrait 1879-80 oil on canvas Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Ferdinand Hodler The Drinkers 1886 oil on canvas Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Self Portrait 1886 drawing, with added gouache Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Ferdinand Hodler The Dispute 1894 oil on canvas Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Spring 1901 mixed media on canvas Museum Folkwang, Essen |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Forest Stream near Leissigen 1904 oil on canvas Kunsthaus Zürich |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Landscape at Lake Geneva ca. 1906 oil on canvas Neue Pinakothek, Munich |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Student at Jena in 1813 ca. 1908 oil on canvas (study for fresco) Neue Pinakothek, Munich |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Lake Thun with Symmetrical Reflections 1909 oil on canvas Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Woman in a Transport 1911 oil on canvas Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Unanimity 1911-12 oil on canvas Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Portrait of Mathias Morhardt 1913 oil on canvas Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Portrait of Félix Vibert 1915 oil on canvas Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Valentine Godé-Darel on her Deathbed 1915 gouache and oil paint on paper Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Self Portrait ca, 1916 oil on paper Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Ferdinand Hodler Self Portrait ca. 1917-18 drawing Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
Cézanne's much-quoted advice to Bernard to look at nature in terms of simple shapes of known property, that is, in terms of cylinders, cones, and spheres, aims at exactly the same type of reclassification. It surely has nothing to do with cubism but rather with the type of art teaching in French schools which was current at the time Cézanne was young and which he wished to pass on to his young admirer. Art teaching, then, like that of most painters' manuals, still proceeds on the basis of what may be called a "common sense version" of traditional Western philosophy. The world consists of substances which have sensory qualities of varying permanence. Beech leaves "are" small, lozenge-shaped, and bright green, distant mountains "look" blue. The artist's business is simply to analyse appearances down into these qualities and to match those he can in his medium. There is no essential difference, in this view, between the artist who paints a landscape and another who copies a picture. Both are concerned with piecemeal matching, much as a mosaicist would be who works from a cartoon and selects one stone after another that comes as close as possible to the corresponding hue of his prototype, arranging them in the shapes he sees in front of him.
Now the facsimile, like the photograph, has mainly served the aestheticians as a foil to stress the creative element necessary to art. One may admit that the creation of indistinguishable duplicates is of greater interest to the forgers of banknotes than to artists, but we have seen, I hope, that psychologically the making of any likeness is far from being a trivial achievement.
– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)