Alyscamps, Felix Vallotton

Les Nabis

Felix Vallotton

Alyscamps

Les Nabis · Canvas

Félix Vallotton's view of the Alyscamps at Arles, reduced to dark cypresses and pale stone. A quiet vertical painting that gives a room order without asking for attention.

From^$179⁰⁰to $229.00

Canvas · 2 sizes

30x45 cm / 12x18″$179⁰⁰ 40x60 cm / 16x24″$229⁰⁰

Complimentary worldwide delivery · Made to order

Choose a Size

Complimentary Worldwide Delivery

Archival Materials

Made to Order

30 Day Returns

What Vallotton Left Out of Alyscamps

Vallotton withholds almost everything. No sky detail, no foliage texture, no human figure among the tombs. The famous burial avenue at Arles becomes a row of dark spires and flat blocks of stone, seen but not described. He refuses the picturesque ruin that other painters found there. What remains is structure, the vertical rhythm of cypress and monument against a pale, unbroken sky. The eye keeps looking for incident and finds pattern instead. That refusal is the pleasure of the picture.

Vallotton painted this during his years with the Nabis, the group that treated a picture as a decorated surface first and a window second. He was the coldest of them. Where Bonnard warmed everything, Vallotton flattened, simplified, and let edges do the work. Landscape gave him the cleanest field for this. His Provençal scenes strip terrain into masses of colour with almost no modelling. Alyscamps sits squarely in that late series, where grief and geography both become design.

Behind the Piece

Arles, the Avenue of Tombs

The Alyscamps is a Roman necropolis on the edge of Arles, an alley of sarcophagi that medieval Christians kept in use and nineteenth-century painters kept returning to. Gauguin and van Gogh painted it side by side in 1888, chasing its light and its legend. Vallotton came to Provence with different instincts. The Nabis had absorbed Gauguin's lesson about flat colour and carried it toward pure decoration. In their hands a burial ground stopped being romantic ruin and became an arrangement of shapes, dark against light, repeated down an alley until repetition itself was the subject.

The image holds attention because it is so spare. Two or three greens, a warm stone tone, a narrow shaft of light between the trunks. Nothing moves, yet the eye travels up and down the row of cypresses the way a visitor would walk the avenue. Each viewing finds a new edge to follow. That kind of slowness suits daily life. It rewards a glance on the way to the kitchen as much as a long look at night.

Editorial Insight

“A burial ground painted as if grief were a matter of spacing.”

Technique

Flat Colour and Hard Edges

The Mark Stays Visible

At arm's length the surface is not smooth. Vallotton worked with short, even touches that sit beside each other rather than blending into each other. Grass becomes a field of small vertical strokes. Trunk shadows are single decisive bands. Nothing is feathered. This visible hand matters because it keeps the painting a painting, a made thing, even while the image reads as flat pattern from across the room.

Edges Carry the Weight

The composition lives at its boundaries. Each cypress is a dark shape with a clean contour against the sky, and each tomb a pale block with one shadow side. Vallotton draws with the edge itself, no outline, no soft transition. Where a shaft of light cuts between two trunks, the contrast does all the modelling a viewer needs. The picture is essentially a set of decisions about where one colour stops.

Colour Held to a Range

The palette is disciplined almost to severity. Deep greens dominate, warmed by stone ochres and cooled by a single pale sky. There is no bright accent, no red to pull the eye. That restraint is why the work calms a room instead of competing with it. It also means the picture changes character with the light, reading darker and denser in the evening, quieter and paler by a window.

Designing with Alyscamps

The deep greens and pale sky want a plain backdrop. On a plaster white or warm grey wall the cypresses read at once; against saturated colour they disappear. Hang it in a hallway, where the vertical rhythm suits a narrow passage, or above a low sideboard in a study where nothing else competes for the same band of wall. Centre it at eye level, around 145 cm, since the composition is a single band and needs no salon grouping. The smaller size suits an entry or the wall beside a bookcase. The larger one holds its own over a desk or a reading chair, where its stillness does the work a busier picture cannot.

Sizes and Prices for Alyscamps

Alyscamps is produced as a canvas in 2 sizes. Each is printed to order on archival stock and ships free worldwide.

Canvas · 2 sizes

30x45 cm / 12x18″$179⁰⁰ 40x60 cm / 16x24″$229⁰⁰

Own Alyscamps

Felix Vallotton, produced as a canvas and made to order. Complimentary delivery, worldwide.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What kind of frame comes with this piece?

Every print ships in a hardwood frame built from conservation-grade materials, chosen to sit quietly behind the artwork rather than compete with it, while still protecting the print itself.

Is shipping really free, and how long will it take to arrive?

Shipping is free on every order, everywhere, with no minimum spend. Most orders arrive within 5 to 10 business days depending on destination.

Are archival materials used in production?

They are. Each print is produced on archival paper and finished with UV-protective acrylic glazing to slow color fade over the years.

Can I return this if it isn't right for the space?

Yes. Returns are accepted within 30 days of delivery for a full refund or an exchange, no questions asked.