Ferdinand Hodler has generally been regarded as one of the most eminent representatives of the symbolism in European art. And this is mainly why these works of his which couldn't fit such a qualification have been passed over in silence or treated as the casual ones. The place the standard modern art history has put Hodler in makes very difficult to accept to accept his representations of death and to acknowledge, first of all, the series of works showing the agonies of Augustine Dupin (1909) and Valentine Gode-Darel (1914—1915), two women who played the important role in the painter's life. The art history underestimates these works because of their unusual way of grasping the theme itself too, the manner which breaks the generally accepted formulas of the time. Both series have equivalents neither in representing the ultimate situations nor in symbolic thinking and the even more progressive trends in art circa 1900.