Félix Vallotton was a Swiss-born painter and printmaker, born in Lausanne in 1865 and dead in Paris in 1925. He arrived in Paris at sixteen, joined the Nabis as their foreign member, and in the 1890s turned the woodcut into a sharp black-and-white art of city crowds and bourgeois lies.
He is remembered today for cool, airless interiors where a quiet room feels like the scene of something that has just happened.
Start with The Ball, painted in 1899. It shows a park from high above. A small girl in a yellow hat runs across a patch of sunlight after a red ball, while dark trees close in behind her and two pale figures talk far off. Nothing happens, and the eye keeps waiting for it to.
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The man who painted that sunny park had spent the previous decade cutting adultery and police charges into black wood blocks. In 1893 the editor of La Revue Blanche described him as a man who seemed constantly on his guard. In the year of The Ball he left his girlfriend, the model Hélène Chatenay, and married a rich widow with three children, the daughter of the art dealer Alexandre Bernheim.
That same year he painted the new family at dinner. In Dinner by Lamplight, as one critic reads it, Vallotton shows himself as a menacing figure seen over his shoulder, looking at his frightened stepdaughter. A man had married into money and comfort, and he painted the dinner table as a place to be afraid.
The 2019 retrospective at the Royal Academy in London gave him the title that stuck: Painter of Disquiet.
What You'll Discover
Why they called him the foreigner.
What he cut into wood.
Whose money he married into.
What is wrong in his rooms.
The battle with nobody in it.