Félix Vallotton was a preeminent painter of intimate interior scenes in fin-de-siècle Paris, of which Papotage, 1902, is a quintessential example. Papotage presents a familial scene of the artist’s wife, Gabrielle Rodrigues-Hénriques, in conversation with relatives, placed at an emotional and physical remove that aligns with Modernist anxieties of the isolation and anonymity of city life. The painting reflects a significant change in Vallotton’s artistic and social milieu, initiated by his 1899 marriage to Gabrielle, the daughter of the founder of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, an important venue for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Vallotton’s newfound financial stability, alongside consistent access to exhibition space, allowed the artist to focus on the interior paintings, like Papotage, that would become his enduring legacy as an artist.ⁱ The present work was inherited at the artist’s death by his wife and his brother; his son-in-law, Jacques Rodrigues-Henriques, applied the timbre marking the work’s authenticity.

 

Though friendly with the Nabis, Vallotton built his own reputation as one of Paris’ leading printmakers of the 1890s. Credited with reviving the medium of woodcut printing, Vallotton was famous for the pictorial simplicity, acerbic wit, and acute social commentary of his prints, and he was one of the favored illustrators of La Revue blanche, a radical arts and literary magazine that published work by the top artists and writers of fin-de-siècle Paris.ⁱⁱ In Papotage, Vallotton translates the clean pictorial surfaces and wry sensibility of his woodcut prints into his practice as a painter.

 

Papotage, which translates to “chatter” or “gossip,” depicts Gabrielle at center in a bright purple dress, while her sister, Marguerite Aghion, at right, and a woman named Mademoiselle Barney lean towards one another in conversation. Vallotton simplifies Aghion and Barney’s facial features to the shadows of cheeks and eyelashes, but Gabrielle’s expression is bright and clear. With just a few lines of brown paint, Vallotton renders a raised eyebrow, quick, dark eyes, and a barely-concealed smirk on his wife’s face. This virtuosic painted shorthand reveals Vallotton’s skill, honed as a printmaker, for expressing a depth of wit in limited pictorial means. His lifelong admiration for Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres shines as well, through the smooth rendering of surfaces, especially the women’s skin, and the rounded contours of their bodies and armchairs.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

While Papotage reflects a wider change in Vallotton’s subject matter around 1900 from the streets of Paris to bourgeois interiors, his astute grasp of human relationships remains paramount. So, too, does the artist’s sense of self as an outsider, or observer—the Swiss artist was called le Nabi étranger by his French peers, and he was a stranger to his wife’s social class, still adapting to his new place in her family, including as stepfather to her children.^iv

 

In Papotage, there is a clear separation between the gossiping women and the viewer—the women sit deep in the picture plane, their distance from the viewer further defined by the length of the tan bench receding sharply towards them. The opacity of the women’s expressions creates a sense of emotional distance, as well; the viewer is close enough to see these women, to paint them, but perhaps too far to hear what they are saying. Aghion’s leaning posture further suggests a whispering confidentiality and exclusion of eavesdroppers.

 

Vallotton deployed this depth of plane as a means of emotional distancing across his oeuvre, as in Le Poker, 1902, Musée d’Orsay, another work in which Gabrielle and her family are placed deep in the scene, behind a long, receding table.^v Vallotton expresses his ambiguous position as both outsider and member of the family through the pictorial space and surface of Papotage, in a wry marriage of emotional resonance and artistic form.

 

 

ⁱ Dita Amory et al., Félix Vallotton, exh. cat., the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2019, pp. 9-10, 13-14.

ⁱⁱ Ibid., p. 26.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid., p. 14.

^iv Ibid., pp. 32-33; 9-10.

^v “Le Poker,” Musée d’Orsay, accessed Sep. 2023, online.