Portrait du peintre Vallotton

Vuillard's 1897 portrait of Félix Vallotton at the Kunstmuseum Bern documents one of the most interesting relationships within the Nabi group — two painters of complementary and contrasting temperaments, both committed to the movement's formal program but expressing it through entirely different means. Vallotton, Swiss-born and trained partly in Lausanne, brought a graphic severity to his Nabi work that was quite different from Vuillard's chromatic intimism: his woodblock prints, which were the most widely reproduced works of the Nabi circle in the 1890s, showed a precision of contour and a stark black-and-white contrast that gave the movement's decorative flatness a harder, more graphic character. Vuillard's portrait of Vallotton may pay homage to this graphic sensibility — the clarity of the face's description showing the influence of the sitter's own printmaking method on the painter depicting him. Bern's Kunstmuseum, appropriately given Vallotton's Swiss origins, holds this intimate record of artistic friendship and cross-influence within the Nabi circle.

Vallotton's angular features and intense gaze are captured with a flat, precise handling that echoes his own woodcut print sensibility — Vuillard may be paying homage to his colleague's graphic method in the clarity of the figure's description. The surrounding interior is rendered with Vuillard's characteristic compressed patterning that absorbs the figure into its environment.