Designing with Outskirts of Lausanne

This is a picture for a room you pass through. A hallway, a dining room, the wall opposite a staircase, anywhere the eye needs a calm point to land. The palette is warm at the centre, cream and rose and terracotta, with cool blue running through the shadows, so it sits naturally against off-white, sage or warm grey walls and holds its own above oak or walnut furniture. Hang it at seated eye level in a dining room, centred over a sideboard, and let the roofline run parallel to the table below. The smaller size suits a corridor or a study nook. The larger one has the presence to anchor a dining wall without shouting, and the flat planes read clearly even in low evening light.

Vallotton Reads Lausanne in Blocks

The eye enters low, among tilled plots, and climbs. Garden wall to cypress shadow, shadow to plaster facade, facade to the red repeat of roofs. Each step is a flat block of colour fitted against the next, and the slope of the town does the work a horizon usually does. Nothing is drawn so much as set down. From across a room the picture reads as three bands, warm stone against cool blue under a high pale sky, and that simple structure is what keeps it legible at any distance.

Vallotton painted this in his mature years, after the sharp black-and-white woodcuts that made his name had given way to landscapes of deliberate calm. He never fully abandoned the woodcut habit. It survives here in the way forms are separated by edge rather than by modelling, each plane given its own colour and left alone. The result is a landscape that behaves almost like design, ordered enough to live with daily and never fussy about it.

Swiss Order Meets Parisian Flatness

In the 1890s a group of young painters around Gauguin and the Pont-Aven circle, later called the Nabis, decided that a picture was first a set of coloured surfaces and only second a window. Vallotton, Swiss by birth and Parisian by career, took that idea further than most. His landscapes are built like mosaics, planes fitted edge to edge, the perspective flattened and the colour doing the spatial work. He stands slightly apart from the movement, cooler and more exact, which is why his townscapes read as composed rather than painted.

What holds attention here is the discipline of the palette. Cream and pale rose for the sunlit plaster, a long blue for shadow, terracotta for the roofs, a dry ochre for grass. Four or five colours, carefully tuned, and the whole hillside emerges from their arrangement. It is a picture that rewards the tenth look as much as the first, because the relationships between the blocks keep shifting as the light in your room changes through the day.

Planes Fitted Edge to Edge

Colour as Structure

At arm's length you can see how the space is built by temperature rather than line. Warm planes advance, the cream facades and rose plaster. Cool planes recede, the blue shadows and the tilled ground. Vallotton lets this do the work of perspective, so the hillside climbs convincingly without a single drawn contour. Stand back and the picture resolves; step close and it dissolves into tidy colour fields. That double behaviour is the pleasure of it.

The Repeating Roof

The red tiles run across the middle of the picture like a pattern, broken by a chimney, a gate, a stretch of dry grass. Each interruption is small but deliberate, and each one pulls the eye somewhere new. Up close these breaks are where the painting feels most alive, the places where an orderly system admits a little accident. On a wall they give the eye a route to travel, again and again.

A High Horizon

The sky takes only a narrow strip at the top, so the land itself carries the weight. This is the compositional decision that makes the picture feel solid and grounded, more architecture than view. Vallotton keeps the horizon high and lets the tiers of the town fill the rest. The effect on a wall is stability, a picture that sits low in a room and anchors whatever hangs around it.

More Works by Felix Vallotton

Further works by Felix Vallotton in the Auvrique collection.

Felix Vallotton

Breithorn

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Felix Vallotton

Breithorn

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Felix Vallotton

Jungfrau

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Felix Vallotton

Jungfrau

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