Félix Vallotton

Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris

Paul Rosenberg, Paris (acquired from the above in 1900)

Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 21 May 1909, lot 43 (consigned by the above)

Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired at the above sale)

Pierre Goujon, Paris (acquired by 1914)

Lily Goujon-Reinach, Paris (acquired by descent from the above)

Private Collection, Paris (acquired by descent from the above)

Wildenstein & Co. Inc., New York (acquired from the above in 1985)

Acquired from the above on 3 April 1986 by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Oeuvres de Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Ibels, Aristide Maillol, Hermann Paul, Ranson, Roussel, Sérusier, Vallotton, Vuillard, 1900, no. 7 (titled Sommeil)

New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery; Houston, Museum of Fine Arts; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum and Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Félix Vallotton: A Retrospective, 1991-93, no. 19, p. 24, illustrated in color; pp. 113 and 297 (catalogued as oil on board) (New Haven); no. 19, p. 24, illustrated in color; pp. 113 and 313 (Lausanne)

Livre de Raison, no. 411

Thadée Natanson, “Félix Vallotton, peintre,” L’Art décoratif. Revue internationale d’art industriel et de décoration, vol. II, issue 19, October 1899-March 1900, p. 5, illustrated (titled Dormant)

André Fontainas, “Art moderne,” Mercure de France, vol. 34, May 1900, p. 544

Julius Meier-Graefe, “Félix Vallotton,” Dekorative Kunst. Illustrierte Zeitschrift für angewandte Kunst, vol. VI, issue 7, 1900, p. 293, illustrated (titled Im Schlaf)

Mir Iskousstva, Le Monde artiste, Saint Petersburg, nos. 2-3, 1901, p. 64, illustrated

Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler, Félix Vallotton et ses amis, Paris, 1936, no. 411, p. 284

Exh. Cat., Kunsthaus Zürich, Félix Vallotton, Werkverzeichnis 1865-1925, 1938, no. 411, p. 49

Günter Busch, Bernard Dorival, Patrick Grainville and Doris Jakubec, Vallotton, Lausanne, 1985, pl. 97, p. 101, illustrated; p. 234 (as oil on canvas)

Marina Ducrey, Félix Vallotton, His Life, His Technique, His Paintings, Lausanne, 1989, p. 82; p. 83, illustrated in color

Exh. Cat., Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts and Marseille, Musée Cantini, Le très singulier Vallotton, 2001, p. 58 (note 29) 

Marina Ducrey and Katia Poletti, Félix Vallotton, 1865-1925, L’Oeuvre peint, Lausanne, 2005, no. 283, vol. I, p. 252, illustrated in color; pp. 251 and 273; vol. II, p. 173, illustrated in color 

Félix Vallotton’s tightly composed painting of a slumbering woman is among his most vivid and accomplished interior scenes. Choosing to show only the model’s vulnerable face emerging from the swathe of patterns that envelop her, he creates an image that is at once serene and suffocating—the textiles becoming a dominating force that verges on the overwhelming, while the dark, weighty furniture reinforces both the heaviness of sleep and a sense of domestic confinement. Painted in 1899, Femme couchée dormant (Le Sommeil) is almost certainly a portrait of Vallotton’s new bride Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques (née Bernheim). The couple married in May of that year, triggering a complete change in the artist’s way of life and a significant shift in his practice. Gabrielle was a wealthy widow and the daughter of the successful art dealer Alexandre Bernheim—one of the most important promoters of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in Paris. “I have known her for four years,” Vallotton wrote to his brother, “she is surely a good woman with whom I will get along easily. She has three children, the oldest is fifteen, the youngest seven, thus they are grown, they like me and I will love them. We expect to live together without changing our habits or almost, me at my work, she in her interior, it will be very reasonable” (quoted in Exh. Cat., New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, Vallotton, 1991, p. 271).

Marriage brought Vallotton a combination of personal stability and companionship, along with a marked elevation in social status and valuable professional connections. In many respects, it was a happy and strategic union, though not without its underlying strains. In this bourgeois alliance—where wealth and standing seemed as significant as love and affection (see figs. 1 and 3)—Vallotton embraced the very elements he had previously critiqued: women, marriage, society and money, all subjects he had satirized in his celebrated print series Intimités, published just a year before his wedding. The union ended his long friendship with the anarchist artist Charles Maurin, who felt Vallotton had conformed to bourgeois norms, while his fellow Nabis painter Édouard Vuillard remarked on the change with the comment, “There seems to have been a revolution” (quoted in ibid., p. 34). By joining his life with Gabrielle’s, Vallotton surrendered the fiercely guarded independence he had long valued, and in doing so, left behind Hélène Chatenay, the working-class seamstress who had been his mistress since 1892.

Vallotton was born in 1865 to a Protestant family in the Swiss city of Lausanne. He left for Paris aged sixteen, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian and showed a remarkable facility for portraiture. In 1885 his work was exhibited publicly for the first time, when two of his paintings were accepted into the Salon. Yet such progress wasn’t enough to ease the financial strains that he faced, and he turned to illustration, writing and art restoration to make ends meet. By the late 1890s, Vallotton was renowned as the principal illustrator for Le revue blanche, the leading cultural journal in Paris, known for his sharply observant woodcuts that were praised for their bold black-andwhite contrasts, flattened silhouettes, and biting social commentary. After marrying, Vallotton could afford to all but give up his print work. He was now able to devote himself to his first love, painting, and his new lifestyle opened up a rich vein of subject matter in the subtle intimacies of domestic life, with Gabrielle serving as his favorite model.

Not least among the changes in Vallotton’s life was his departure from the bohemian Latin Quarter, where he had lived since arriving in Paris. In June 1899, he secured an apartment at 6 rue de Milan, in the heart of the 9th arrondissement—a fashionable new district close to the Saint-Lazare train station filled with middle-class households and new apartments. Here, Vallotton inhabited the very world he so often critiqued in his art, where outward respectability and so often masked private chaos (see fig. 2). It was the same world that playwright Georges Feydeau skewered in his 1886 farce Tailleur pour dames (Ladies’ Dressmaker), where the 9th-district setting served as shorthand for the bourgeois society he lampooned. Yet amid the ironies that defined Vallotton’s life, his paintings of Gabrielle and their home from this period convey a subdued sense of warmth, domestic ease, and personal contentment. Even Gertrude Stein noted that he was “very happy with his wife and she was a very charming woman” (Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, New York, 1933, p. 61).

The family lodgings, on the fifth floor of the Rue de Milan building, included a studio under the roof for Vallotton to work. Yet Femme couchée dormant is not set in Gabrielle’s spacious bedroom, familiar from paintings such as Femme se coiffant, 1900 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; see fig. 5), nor in his studio. Vallotton’s biographer, Marina Ducrey, has suggested that the somewhat masculine furnishings indicate the scene may be set in the artist’s own bedroom. The same wallpaper and wooden bed with its red-and-gold cover reappear in Nu de dos dans un interieur of 1902 (Kunsthalle Bremen), where the figure of a half-dressed woman seen from behind anticipates Vallotton’s later preoccupation with sculptural nudes in interior settings. These subjects, however, ran in parallel to his treatment of Gabrielle, whose modesty he always preserved. She was frequently portrayed against the backdrop of their home, whether playing the piano, at her toilette, arranging the linen cupboard, or interacting with her children—she is the guardian of the hearth, central to the home they dwell in. However, in such works, Vallotton did not attempt literal portraits: her stylized features and silhouette evoke less a likeness than an atmosphere, a distilled sense of the feminine woven into the rhythms of everyday life.

The poetics of domestic space and the sphere of women were a common theme within the Nabis artistic circle, where familiar interiors became stages for both symbolic meaning and aesthetic experimentation. However, unlike Pierre Bonnard or Édouard Vuillard, who reveled in patterned surfaces and chromatic harmonies, Vallotton tended to keep his forms pared back, his palettes restricted, and his compositions taut (see fig. 4). This austerity has often been interpreted as a moral stance, or a reflection of Vallotton’s detached, outsider persona: his images were not ornamental frills but sober statements, their impact heightened by an economy of means. In this regard, the deliberate clash of patterns of Femme couchée dormant may be seen as more than a record of bourgeois taste. It draws Vallotton into the current of late nineteenth-century anxieties about decoration itself. At the fin de siècle, ornament was charged with meanings that went far beyond style. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), tangled motifs became both prison and torment, their proliferating forms a metaphor for female entrapment within the bourgeois home. By the early 1900s, Adolf Loos would condemn such embellishment as a sign of cultural decline, insisting that true progress lay in the elimination of ornament altogether. Between these poles, artists found in decoration a language for the unseen.

Gauguin’s arabesques and color harmonies became emblems of the spiritual; Vuillard dissolved figures into wallpaper and fabric to evoke the psychic pressure of domestic life; while the florid curlicues of the Art Nouveau movement sought a return to nature during an era of rapid industrialization and political unrest. Vallotton’s interiors, by contrast, thrum with a quieter but no less unsettling tension: the designs he painted so meticulously in this work seem at once to stabilize and to smother.

The charged interplay between exuberant patterning and methodical execution in Femme couchée dormant may also be due to Vallotton’s use of peinture à la colle (distemper), a medium favored by the Nabis for its saturated, matte tones. Applied quickly while heated, it can yield either a fresco-like crusted surface or, when used thinly as here, an open, swiftly brushed effect. Forms, textures and light effects have all been deliberately simplified, echoing the strong graphic sensibility of Vallotton’s woodcuts and the Japanese prints that influenced them.

However, we also see a reintroduction of spatial perspective and a heightened realism compared to the paintings executed before his marriage, suggesting Vallotton was forging a new direction that harmonized his academic grounding with the innovative approaches of his contemporaries. Vallotton himself did not see originality—so often ascribed to his woodcuts by his peers—as an essential part of the artistic process. As he wrote in 1905, in a contribution to the Mercure de France on recent artistic trends: “I don’t believe that art ever takes new directions, its goals are perpetual, immutable, and have been so forever” (quoted in Exh. Cat., New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, Vallotton, 1991, p. 33). Always determined to follow his path, Vallotton moved through the volatile cultural, social and political landscape of fin-de-siècle France with singular independence (see figs. 5 and 6). He inhabited many worlds, yet his art pursued its own steadfast, uncompromising course, indifferent to the currents swirling around him.

Acquired from Wildenstein & Co. in 1986, Femme couchée dormant has remained in The Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection for nearly forty years and comes to auction for the first time since 1909.