With his newfound financial security he almost entirely stopped making prints, concentrating on painting. Vallotton married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, the daughter of Alexandre Bernheim-Jeune, a prominent gallerist, swapping anarchist circles for the well-heeled domestic life he had previously lampooned. Couples alternately bicker and embrace in their bedrooms, as Vallotton satirises the sexual power plays of the Parisian bourgeoisie.Īn abrupt volte-face came in 1899. Crowds swell, outlined in rich black ink against the hatched pattern of the paving stones. With supreme economy and biting wit, these miniature masterpieces in black and white depict Parisian society in flux. Appearing in the pages of various anarchist and artistic journals from the early 1890s, Vallotton’s prints secured his fame as an artist, leading to his appointment as chief illustrator of the Revue blanche, a prestigious literary magazine. He was one of the earliest exponents of the revival of wood-block printmaking, a medium that had lain dormant since the Renaissance. These are subjects that Vallotton also took up in his prints. In a series of paintings on canvas from these years, bourgeois couples conduct clandestine affairs amid sparse, pastel-toned interiors. Unlike the Nabis, who included Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, Vallotton focussed on the psychology of characters caught in moments of high drama. Vallotton, often painting directly onto cardboard, produced vibrant Parisian street scenes in the flat, decorative style typical of Japanese printmakers.

In his mid-20s he pared back his style, after falling in with a group of painters known as the “Nabis” (“Prophets”), who admired Japanese prints. At first he paid little heed to the avant-garde movements that were taking place around him his early portraits and domestic scenes are characterised by a polished realism and exquisite attention to detail that owes more to the masters of the Northern Renaissance than to Impressionism.

In 1882, when he was 16, Vallotton arrived in Paris from the Swiss city of Lausanne, enrolling at the Académie Julien, an art school with a liberal ethos.

It is this feeling that makes “Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet” – a small but beautifully curated exhibition at the Royal Academy in London – a must-see. But it also hints at the theatricality that sets him apart: the uneasy sense one gets from his prints and paintings that something is going on behind the curtain, concealed from the viewer. Stein’s analogy captures Vallotton’s meticulousness. Vallotton, a Swiss artist, would begin at the top of the canvas, painting methodically in horizontal strips, until he had reached the bottom. After watching Félix Vallotton at work, Gertrude Stein memorably compared his painting process to “pulling down a curtain”.

Artist felix vallotton