Félix Vallotton

Biography

In 1885 Vallotton started a notebook that he called his Livre de Raison, or “account book”. In it he listed every painting, drawing, sculpture and print, and he kept it up until his death; by then it recorded about 1,700 works. Nobody else in his circle was so methodical.

He was born on 28 December 1865 in Lausanne, into a conservative Protestant middle-class family, the third of four children. His father kept a pharmacy and later bought a chocolate factory. From 1875 Vallotton attended the Collège Cantonal and graduated in 1882 with a degree in classical studies. Alongside school he went to drawing lessons with Jean-Samson Guignard, where his bent for close, almost clinical observation first showed. He persuaded his parents to let him go to Paris to study art.

In January 1882 he settled on the Rue Jacob and enrolled at the Académie Julian, under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. He spent hours in the Louvre: Holbein, Dürer and above all Ingres mattered to him, and he took them as models all his life. In 1883 he passed the competition for the École des Beaux-Arts but stayed at the Académie Julian, where his friends were. In 1885 he showed at the Salon the Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach, in the manner of Ingres, and his first self-portrait, which earned an honorable mention. Lefebvre criticised two portraits of 1887, painted with deliberate bluntness.

The years that followed were hard. His father was in financial difficulties himself and could not help, and Vallotton came down with typhoid fever. To earn money he restored paintings for the gallery owner Henri Haro. In 1889, at the Universal Exposition, he saw Japanese prints, Hokusai among them, and they strongly influenced him. From 1890 to 1897 he wrote about thirty articles on the Paris art world for the Gazette de Lausanne. In 1891 he showed for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants, an exhibition society open to avant-garde artists, and his first woodcut was a portrait of Paul Verlaine. His method was this: first a precise, detailed drawing, then its simplification, and then simplification again.

In 1892 Vallotton joined the Nabis, a group of young Paris artists (Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard); with Vuillard he formed a lifelong friendship. He kept somewhat apart from the others, which earned him the joking title “the Foreign Nabi”. His painting of these years took on the language of his prints: flat patches of colour, hard outlines, minimal detail. “Bathers on a Summer Evening” (1892–93) was met with laughter and harsh criticism at the exhibition. His prints, by contrast, found clients: illustrations for La Revue Blanche, the Chicago Chap-Book and other publications, and covers for theatre programmes. Through the publisher of La Revue Blanche, Thadée Natanson, he entered the Paris avant-garde. Among his subjects were street crowds and demonstrations, including clashes between police and anarchists. The height of his graphic work was “Intimités” (1898), ten interiors showing tension between a man and a woman. He also made a series of portraits of writers and politicians for Remy de Gourmont’s “Book of Masks”. In the Dreyfus affair Vallotton passionately defended Dreyfus and produced satirical woodcuts, printed on the front page of Le Cri de Paris in January 1898.

In 1899 he married Gabrielle Bernheim, a widow with three children and the daughter of the art dealer Alexandre Bernheim, founder of the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. The family connection gave him financial support, and he gradually gave up printmaking for painting. In 1900 he became a French citizen. By then the Nabis were drifting apart, partly because of the Dreyfus affair. Of all his pictures I would single out “The Ball” (1899): seen from above, a sunlit stretch of ground with a tiny girl, and in the distance two figures talking about something.

In 1903 he exhibited in Vienna, Bernheim-Jeune gave him a one-man show, and the French state bought one of his paintings for the first time, for the Luxembourg Museum. Money was still unsteady. He tried his hand at sculpture, wrote plays, two of which were staged, and novels, among them the semi-autobiographical “The Murderous Life”, published only after his death. In 1907 a show at Bernheim-Jeune brought the sale of thirteen paintings. His first museum exhibition took place in Zurich in 1909. In 1912 he was offered the Legion of Honour and, like Bonnard and Vuillard, declined it.

When war broke out in 1914 Vallotton wanted to volunteer, but at forty-eight he was turned down. In 1915–16 he returned to woodcut for the first time since 1901 and made the series “This Is War”, his last prints. In June 1917 the Ministry of Fine Arts sent him with two other artists on a three-week tour of the front line; from his sketches he painted pictures, including “The Church of Souain in Silhouette”. After the war he turned to still lifes, to “composite landscapes” painted in the studio from memory, and to frankly erotic nudes. He and his wife spent winters in Cagnes-sur-Mer and summers in Honfleur. In all he left more than 1,700 paintings and about 200 prints.

Vallotton died on 29 December 1925 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the day after his sixtieth birthday.

He is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery. In 1926 the Salon des Indépendants held a retrospective of his work.