This is one of Hodler's late landscapes, painted near Berne in Switzerland. It is thought to be the only work by Hodler in a British public collection. The painting is dominated by the horizontal line, which the artist saw as symbolic of death. He made a remarkable series of paintings of his dying wife and later of his dying lover, stretched out horizontally across the centre of the canvas. Hodler even wrote about the central mountain peaks in those landscapes as representing the soul of his beloved. Nature, life, love and death are thus unified in this majestic landscape.