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 :. | The Beach Promenade in Etretat | Andromeda | The Red Cardigan | Woman combing her hair in the bathroom | The Beach at Honfleur |
Related Artists:
James Holland
1799-1870 British English painter. As a boy he was employed for seven years to paint flowers on pottery in the factory of John Davenport ( fl 1793; d 1848) of Longport. In 1819 Holland moved to London, where he continued at first to work as a pottery painter but also undertook watercolours of flowers and natural history subjects, exhibiting his works at the Royal Academy from 1824. After 1828 oil paintings predominated over watercolours in the many pictures that he exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Society of Painters in Water-Colours (of which he was made an associate in 1835), the British Institution and the Society of British Artists. He travelled to Paris in 1831 and subsequently made repeated tours of the Continent. Buildings in European cities now became his favourite subject, and above all, scenes of Venice, which he first visited in 1835; his Venetian views have sometimes been confused with those by Richard Parkes Bonington. In 1837 he was commissioned by the Landscape Annual to make drawings in Portugal, which were engraved in the issue for 1839. He travelled again to Venice in 1845, 1851 and 1857, making sketches en route of the Low Countries, France, Switzerland and Austria. Other subjects favoured by Holland were Blackheath and Greenwich (both London), where he lived from 1830 to 1845. He was renowned for his fluent draughtsmanship and for his brilliant colouring in both oils and watercolours, making liberal use of gouache in the latter. The contents of his studio were auctioned at Christie's, London, on 26 May 1870.
Thomas Shotter Boys
English Engraver, 1803-1874 English painter and printmaker. He was apprenticed on 4 February 1817 to George Cooke. His early training in engraving influenced his future career; his ability to draw a fine line, lay aquatint washes and hand-colour prints was an important factor in the creation of his particularly lucid style of watercolour landscapes and townscapes. At this time Cooke was engraving volumes of picturesque views by Turner and James Hakewell (1778-1843) as well as his own view of the Thames (1822);
James Northcote
RA (22 October 1746 - 13 July 1831), was an English painter was born at Plymouth, and was apprenticed to his father, a poor watchmaker. In his spare time, he drew and painted. In 1769 he left his father and set up as a portrait painter. Four years later he went to London and was admitted as a pupil into the studio and house of Sir Joshua Reynolds. At the same time he attended the Royal Academy schools. In 1775 he left Reynolds, and about two years later, having made some money by portrait painting back in Devon, he went to study in Italy. On his return to England, three years later, he revisited his native county, then settled in London, where John Opie and Henry Fuseli were his rivals. He was elected associate of the Academy in 1786, and full academician in the following spring. The "Young Princes murdered in the Tower," his first important work on a historical subject, dates from 1786, and it was followed by the "Burial of the Princes in the Tower". Both paintings, along with seven others, were intended for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. The "Death of Wat Tyler", now in the Guildhall, London, was exhibited in 1787; and shortly afterwards Northcote began a set of ten subjects, entitled "The Modest Girl and the Wanton", which were completed and engraved in 1796. Among the productions of Northcote's later years are the "Entombment" and the "Agony in the Garden," besides many portraits, and several animal subjects, such as "Leopards", "Dog and Heron", and "Lion".