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With the marriage came three step-children. Later work focusing on interiors and home life retained that brooding and intense feel, following Vallotton’s marrage to the widowed, and rich, Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques. I loved the large, perhaps semi-ironic tryptych Le Bon Marché (which I was prevented from photographing, as the gallery hadn’t been able to attain permission to reproduce it) recording crowds in a 19th century department store, and the rise of incipient capitalism in Paris. His technical skill is undeniable (as in the painting above), and when eschewing realism, his paintings are full of brooding intensity or knowing vitality. In a review in The Times, the critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston stated that Vallotton could be “an awful painter”, but I couldn’t disagree more. For example, his work Cinq Heures, references the time, after work, when a bourgeois professional might call on his mistress at home before returning to his wife. Vallotton’s woodcuts were especially acclaimed, and a series of intense vignettes catalogued scenes of domestic intrigue and hypocrisy.

Later work included illustrations for the literary and artistic magazine La revue blanche, and his emergence as a prominent graphic artist. The early still life above is brilliant in its technical virtuosity, with the hyper realistic reflective surfaces of the jug and the rumpled fabric. A contemporary of French artists Bonnard and Vuillard, he remained outside the mainstream. He painted vivid and intense still lifes and landscapes, but was also well known for his piercing, satirical eye, his involvement with the resurgence of printmaking and his illustrations for satirical and left-wing journals.

The RA’s exhibition guide says that Vallotton was described as the “very singular Vallotton”, and his versatility is astounding. I’d seen reproductions of Swiss artist Félix Vallotton’s work posted up all over the London transport network to advertise the recent exhibition of his work, and was determined to make it to the Royal Academy before the show ended on 29 September 2019.īorn in Lausanne, Switzerland, Vallotton left home for the French capital, Paris, at the age of 16.