1865-1925was a Swiss painter and printmaker associated with Les Nabis. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He was born into a conservative middle class family in Lausanne, and there he attended College Cantonal, graduating with a degree in classical studies in 1882. In that year he moved to Paris to study art under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Academie Julian. He spent many hours in the Louvre, where he greatly admired the works of Holbein, Derer and Ingres; these artists would remain exemplars for Vallotton throughout his life.[1] His earliest paintings, such as the Ingresque Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach (1885), are firmly rooted in the academic tradition, and his self portrait of 1885 (seen at right) received an honorable mention at the Salon des artistes français in 1886. During the following decade Vallotton painted, wrote art criticism and made a number of prints. In 1891 he executed his first woodcut, a portrait of Paul Verlaine. The many woodcuts he produced during the 1890s were widely disseminated in periodicals and books in Europe as well as in the United States, and were recognized as radically innovative in printmaking. They established Vallotton as a leader in the revival of true woodcut as an artistic medium; in the western world, the relief print, in the form of commercial wood engraving, had long been mainly utilized unimaginatively as a medium for the reproduction of drawn or painted images and, latterly, photographs. Vallotton's starkly reductive woodcut style features large masses of undifferentiated black and areas of unmodulated white. While emphasizing outline and flat patterns, Vallotton generally made no use of the gradations and modeling traditionally produced by hatching. The influences of post-Impressionism, symbolism and the Japanese woodcut are apparent; a large exhibition of ukiyo-e prints had been presented at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890, and Vallotton, like many artists of his era an enthusiast of Japonism, collected these prints. He depicted street crowds and demonstrations including several scenes of police attacking anarchists bathing women, portrait heads, and other subjects which he treated with a sardonic humor. His graphic art reached its highest development in Intimit's (Intimacies), a series of ten interiors published in 1898 by the Revue Blanche, which deal with tension between men and women. Vallotton's prints have been suggested as a significant influence on the graphic art of Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner .By 1892 he was affiliated with Les Nabis, a group of young artists that included Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, with whom Vallotton was to form a lifelong friendship. During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail.  Related Paintings of Felix Vallotton :. | woman in the street | La Malade | The Wind | Woman Searching through a cupboard | Gabrielle Vallotton |
Related Artists:
Cornelis Holsteyn
(1618 - 2 December 1658) was a Dutch Golden Age painter from Haarlem. According to the RKD he was a painter of historical allegories, portraits, and interior decorations, trained by his father Pieter Holsteyn I. According to Houbraken, his father was a glass painter, and thus was trained for glass painting, but the market in glass painting not being what it was, he turned his hand to painting canvas. Houbraken felt he received less for a painting than he deserved, because his work was of a very high quality. He describes a Triumph of Bacchus, and a Lycurgus, which was painted for the Amsterdam Orphanage. According to the RKD, he moved to Amsterdam with his brother Pieter Holsteyn II in 1647, became poorter there in 1652, and was betrothed there on Christmas eve, 1654. He was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk on December 2, 1658 from his home on the Rozengracht. Houbraken claimed he had been fit until his sudden death by Hartvang, or heart-attack.
Gabriel Bella
Italian, 1730-1799
Ernst Meisel
painted Gretchen beim Kirchgang in 1894