Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter interweaves the psychobiography of the painter Ferdinand Hodler, including an analysis of the scores of paintings and drawings he made of his dying lover, Valentine Godé-Darel, with an account of the night the author’s wife, Anne Walrod, died unexpectedly of a viral infection of her heart. The chapter poses the question, “What life experiences prepared and enabled Hodler to depict the death of his muse?” Looking at Hodler’s art, made over many months as Darel’s illness progressed, provides the author with time to mourn his wife’s death while giving him the means to transform his trauma into an aesthetic form. Similarly, the chapter describes the author’s use of museums as transitional spaces that facilitated his mourning process. In its interweaving of biography and autobiography, along with an invitation for the reader to identify with these narratives, the chapter becomes even more inclusive—transbiographic—in its crossing between and connecting many lives.</jats:p>