Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was a Swiss-born painter and printmaker who moved to Paris at sixteen and spent the next four decades occupying a position of complete artistic independence — affiliated with the Nabis movement of the 1890s but never fully absorbed by it, earning him the affectionate nickname "le Nabi étranger," the foreign Nabi. His woodcuts of the 1890s — bold, spare compositions in pure black and white depicting street scenes, bathers, and the charged private moments of bourgeois domestic life — were among the most radical graphic works of the fin de siècle and influenced Munch, Beardsley, and Kirchner. His paintings are something else entirely: cool, still, and faintly unsettling, with a precision of edge and tone that prefigures American Realism and the New Objectivity decades before either movement existed. "I think I paint for people who are level-headed but who have an unspoken vice deep inside them," he once said — a self-description as precise and enigmatic as his canvases.
