Still Life with Pitcher and Plate

This early still life from 1887 represents Vallotton's formation years in Paris before the development of his distinctive Nabi manner. He had left Lausanne for the École des Beaux-Arts in 1882, and by his mid-twenties was already exhibiting with some success. The subject — a pitcher and plate — belongs to the most modest category of still life painting, yet Vallotton approaches it with the seriousness that would define his career. Held at the Baltimore Museum of Art, this canvas offers an instructive comparison with his mature still lifes: the handling here is more conventionally academic, showing the influence of the careful realist training he received, before the encounter with Gauguin and Japanese prints pushed him toward flattened forms and stark outlines. The blue-white of the plate and the ceramic pitcher provide controlled tonal contrasts, and the composition's simplicity anticipates the economy he would later pursue with greater radicalism. It is a work of accomplished student ambition rather than the mature severity of his later still lifes.

Oil on canvas in an academic realist manner, with more conventional brushwork and tonal gradation than Vallotton's post-1890 style. Reflected light on the ceramic surfaces is handled through careful tonal modelling. The painting demonstrates competent academic technique and a disciplined approach to describing materiality through paint.