A door opens on to a lamplit bedroom, waiting like a trap. What is really going on in The Visit, an alarming scenario in which another couple – she in coat and feather hat, he gripping her tight by the hand – stand at the threshold of a room in which the very furniture seems to be conspiring with a possible assault. Why does the invalid on the left of La Malade face away from us in her bed, which is turned towards the wall, while the maid on the right enters the room like a confident starlet? Two women at odds, as if in quite separate worlds? But there is almost invariably a narrative puzzle at their heart. His paintings are generally compact and small, with sultry hues and the seductive brushwork of the Nabis (he was a lifelong friend of Vuillard). To see is to know: and how well he seems to know himself already – the disquieting boy against the quiet backdrop, turning to us with his sidelong eye.Īnd Vallotton’s vision is uniquely strange. So precise it’s more like limning, in the Holbein tradition, this unnerving image shows the young Vallotton against the chill blue-green background of northern art. This is the subject of Self-portrait at the Age of Twenty, with which this show opens. Photograph: © Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne He notices his own watchful eye.įélix Vallotton’s Self-portrait at the Age of Twenty, 1885. Vallotton notices the advent of the public telephone, the starkness of the new electric lighting, the brawl in the cafe where the white-clothed table is about to crash to the floor in a maelstrom of alcohol and rage.
Small children very often trying to get away from their parents.
There are weird vignettes – a painting of a veiled woman whose poodle leaps into the most alien shape on the boulevard a milling scrum of fashionable Parisians staring hard at something which their obsession obscures from our sight. It is normally hidden in a Swiss bank.īorn to a strict Protestant family in Lausanne, Vallotton escaped to study art in Paris at the age of 16. One of the largest and most startling paintings at the Royal Academy is of the Bon Marché department store in Paris, famous from Zola’s novel The Ladies’ Delight, teeming with shoppers and brilliantly coloured goods – parasols, bottles, ribbons, pyramids of candy – all glowing in the gaslight. His works are scattered all over Europe, too often in private collections. Vallotton is a strange case in his own right very famous in his native Switzerland, hardly shown here. Is it the man or the woman (or both) telling the lies? So who is lying, and what is the lie? That she loves him for himself, not his money that he loves her too, that he really will marry her one day? That there is nobody else? The composition is divided – on one side the couple, on the other a pressure of insinuating scarlet decor – just as the picture divides its audience.
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