Interiors by Design: Félix Vallotton’s disturbing domestics

A domestic interior is an ideal setting for something unusual if not downright unsettling. Amid everyday furniture and decor, something odd is going on. Although best known today as one of the Nabis, Félix Vallotton painted disturbing interiors from the late 1870s, before he joined Maurice Denis and others in the movement, until the early twentieth century, well after he had moved on.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), The Visit, or Top Hat, Interior (1887), oil on canvas, 32.7 x 24.8 cm, Musée Malraux (MuMa), Le Havre, France. Image by Pymouss, via Wikimedia Commons.

He started gently with this oil painting of The Visit or The Top Hat, Interior in 1887, the year that he left the Académie Julian and exhibited his first two paintings (both portraits) at the Salon. A top hat and walking stick are parked on a chair just inside an apartment, whose door is partly open. Everything looks in order, except for the painting on the wall at the right, which is hanging at an odd angle.

Two years later, Vallotton met his first partner, Hélène Chatenay, who later came to model for two further domestic interiors he painted in 1892.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), The Sick Girl (1892), oil on canvas, 73.5 x 100.5 cm, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland. Wikimedia Commons.

The Sick Girl adopts a theme popular with Naturalist painters throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s. Vallotton curiously obscures the face of the young woman in her sickbed by reversing the bed’s expected orientation. Who would ever position their bed to face away from a window and look straight at a near-blank wall? Another strange feature is that the maid who has just entered the room appears to be heading towards the viewer, and isn’t even looking towards her patient.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), The Cook (1892), oil on board, 33 x 41 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

The Cook also features Hélène Chatenay as Vallotton’s model. She stands at the solid-top range in a kitchen strangely almost devoid of the one thing that kitchens are about, food. The only edible item visible is a bunch of onions suspended in mid-air. Everything – the chairs, pots and pans, and the range itself – is spotless as if they have never been used, and appear thoroughly unnatural.

Vallotton then put his interiors on pause for six years while he engaged with the Nabis. He also bought himself an early Kodak mass-market camera, and from 1898 experimented with it for capturing these domestic scenes. He changed partners in 1899, when he married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Hénriques, the widowed daughter of Alexandre Bernheim, one of the leading art dealers of the day.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), The Red Room (1898), distemper on cardboard, 50 x 68.5 cm, Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland. Wikimedia Commons.

Vallotton remained under Nabi influence when he painted The Red Room in 1898 to the extent that he used distemper, a traditional medium that the group had resurrected. A man and woman stand in a loose embrace in the doorway of a living room with brick red decor. Above the fireplace is what appears be a mirror, in which a person dressed in black is standing in the distance, apparently facing away from the couple.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), The Visit (1899), distemper on cardboard, 55.5 x 87 cm, Kunsthaus, Zürich, Switzerland. Wikimedia Commons.

A similar well-dressed couple embrace more closely in The Visit from 1899, also painted in distemper. Once again, Vallotton leaves the painting’s underlying narrative open.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), The Laundress, Blue Room (1900), oil on paper laid on canvas, 50 x 80 cm, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX. Wikimedia Commons.

He followed that in 1900 with The Laundress, Blue Room, that appears to be set in the Vallotton apartment in Paris, with two of his step-children squatting on the folds of large fabric sheets, inside a bedroom with blue decor. Two women are sat working, one apparently on the sheets, the other on separate fabrics.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Woman Searching through a Cupboard (1901), oil on canvas, 78 × 40 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

A year later Vallotton’s Woman Searching through a Cupboard (1901) became even stranger. He shuts out half this painting’s image with black screens and the doors to the cupboard, in a gloomy repoussoir. The woman, in spite of a lamp by her side, is also little more than a black silhouette, who appears to absorb the light falling on her. The lamp is strange, with a shade showing sailing ships at sea, its stand being a vertical statuette of Truth, perhaps.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Poker (1902), oil on cardboard, 52 x 67 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

For the following year (1902), he painted this quartet of gamblers in a Poker session. Tucked away in a plush back room behind a club or bar, these four are in full evening dress, playing for stakes which could be breathtaking and bankrupting. In the centre foreground is another lamp with a patterned shade, again showing sailing boats.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Interior, Woman in Blue Searching in a Cupboard (1903), oil on canvas, 81 x 46 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Image by Oakenchips, via Wikimedia Commons.

A couple of years later, in his Interior, Woman in Blue Searching in a Cupboard (1903), Vallotton painted his wife Gabrielle from behind as she stood searching in a cupboard of books.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Interior with Woman in Red (1903), oil on canvas, 92.5 x 70.5 cm, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland. Wikimedia Commons.

His Interior with the Back of a Woman in Red from 1903 develops the framing effect of multiple sets of doors, drawing the eye deeper towards the distant bedroom. The woman wearing a red dress looks away, her skirts swept back as if she has been moving towards the three steps that divide this interior into foreground and background. There are tantalising glimpses of detail on the way: discarded fabric on a settee, clothing on a chair in the next room, and half a double bed with a bedside lamp in the distance.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures (1904), oil on cardboard, 61.5 × 56 cm, Hermitage Museum Государственный Эрмитаж, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1904, Vallotton painted what proved to be one his last disturbing domestic scenes, in Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures. Its narrative is so incomplete that it’s worthy of the sub-genre of the ‘problem picture’. This is another bedroom, where the lady of the house is standing over her maid as the latter is sewing up her evening gown. The mistress stands with her back to the viewer, and her face is only revealed in her reflection in the large mirror on the wardrobe at the back of the room, where the maid is all but invisible. These three figures appear in perspective recession, and to the right of the wardrobe is a doorway, presumably leading through to the master’s bedroom.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Woman Reading in an Interior (1904), oil on board, 60.3 x 34.6 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Wikimedia Commons.

There’s dispute as to whether this painting shows a Woman Reading in an Interior, as given by its French title, or a woman writing. Vallotton painted this in 1904, and charged it with less mystery. But I wonder if the lower of the two paintings on the wall might be one of Degas’ works showing horse-riding. As usual, the single figure doesn’t show her face as she sits at the small bureau, backlit by the window.

The following year Vallotton moved on, eventually painting a series of transcendental landscapes, a far cry from these disturbing domestics.