In 1873 he became a student of Barthélemy Menn, and investigated Dürer’s writings on proportions. He attended science lectures at the Collège de Genève, and in the museum there he copied paintings by Alexandre Calame. In 1871, at the age of 18, Hodler travelled on foot to Geneva to start his career as a painter. From Sommer, Hodler learned the craft of painting conventional Alpine landscapes, typically copied from prints, which he sold in shops and to tourists. After the death of his mother from tuberculosis in 1867, Hodler was sent to Thun to apprentice with a local painter, Ferdinand Sommer. The family's finances were poor, and the nine-year-old Hodler was put to work assisting his stepfather in painting signs and other commercial projects. The birth of additional children brought the size of Hodler's family to thirteen. His mother remarried, to a decorative painter named Gottlieb Schüpach who had five children from a previous marriage. By the time Hodler was eight years old, he had lost his father and two younger brothers to tuberculosis. His father, Jean Hodler, made a meager living as a carpenter his mother, Marguerite (née Neukomm), was from a peasant family. Hodler was born in Bern, the eldest of six children. Later, he adopted a personal form of symbolism he called "parallelism". His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Ferdinand Hodler (Ma– May 19, 1918) was one of the best-known Swiss painters of the nineteenth century.