Importance of Colors at Felix Vallotton’s Paintings
Felix Edouard Vallotton (1865-1925) was a Swiss painter who became a naturalized French citizen in 1900. He was a very productive artist with close to two thousand finished paintings, several hundred woodcuts, and other works during his life. Woodcuts were very important in his early career, being one of his major income sources during the financially insecure years. Like many of his contemporaries, he was heavily influenced by Japanese woodcuts. His main technique was xylography, an ancient printing method, based on wooden blocks, where a picture had to be drawn directly on wood, carved in relief, covered with ink, and finally printed on medium.
This method demands efficient use of materials. Felix Vallotton made a very detailed drawing at first and then simplified it. He made simplifications three, five, or even more times until he achieved the desired effect – the realistic image with just the essence, yet still with a bit of his ironic view. Portraits of his contemporaries and several series of interactions between men and women made him pretty famous. He transferred this method of repeated simplification into oil paintings, as well. While he almost stopped producing prints after his marriage with Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, he kept the same technique during all his painting years, right to the end of his life.
Here is a selection of Felix Vallotton’s paintings, where color is not just used as a tool, but plays a major role as well. Felix Vallotton loved to use vivid, bright colors, spread on flat monochromatic areas with distinctive edges. He also liked to confront complementary colors, especially red and green, often dominating the scene, which can be presented in unusual perspectives. Felix Vallotton was a master of lights and shades, which you’ll also see in the presented selection of about 30 paintings with colors in their titles. They are presented in chronological order so you can explore the changes in his approaches during his formative and mature years.
The Red Room, 1898
Interior with Red Armchair and Figures, 1899
The Red Balloon, 1899
Interior with woman in Red from Behind, 1903
The Laundress, Blue Room, 1906
The Violet Hat, 1907
Use of violet color is pretty rare in oil paintings. In this case, its dominant.
Portrait of a Lady with Yellow Scarf, 1909
Young Woman with Black Hat, 1910
Sunset, Orange Sky, 1910
The Green Ribbon, 1911
Yellow Daisies and Various Flowers, 1911
Reader with a Yellow Necklace, 1912
Pink and Red Tulips, 1912
Torso with Blue Cloth, 1912
The Yellow Fabric, 1913
The Red Sweater, 1913
A ribeye Steak on Yellow Paper, 1914
Yellow Daisies, Yellow Tablecloth, 1915
Red Peppers, 1915
Sunset at Grace, Orange and Violet Sky, 1918
Green Vase and White Bowl, 1919
Double Yellow Tulips on a Wicker Chair, 1923
The Black Soupiere, 1923
Landscape, The House with the Red Roof, 1924
The Green Tree, Cagnes, 1924
The painting above is a textbook of using different green shades to achieve the realistic effect of space.
French Marigold, Purple Daisies, and Golden Sheves, 1925
Roumanian in a Red Dress, 1925
As you can notice, Vallotton preferred interiors at the beginning, then moved to portraits and landscapes, to be mainly focused on still life in his later years. There were also exceptions, of course. We can add that in his last decade of life when more and more health issues limited him, he painted many landscapes from his memory. Despite portraying hundreds of nudes, one of his last works, a portrait of a Roumanian lady of negotiable virtue in a red dress, is probably his most controversial. Today, the original is hung in the Museum d’Orsay in Paris.