Designing with Sous Bois

This is a picture for rooms where you sit still. A reading nook is the obvious home, hung above a low shelf or a narrow console so the vertical trunks have clear air around them. It also earns its place in a hallway, where the eye meets it at walking pace. The greens pair naturally with oak, walnut, linen, and unpainted plaster, and they hold their own against white walls without needing a mat or a gallery hang. Choose the smaller format for a study or beside a bookcase, where it reads as a quiet green window. At the larger sizes the trunks approach life height, and the piece begins to feel like standing at the edge of the wood itself. Center it at eye level and let it do the rest.

Standing Inside Vallotton's Forest

The trunks rise first. Slender verticals in warm brown cross the picture from ground to canopy, spaced like the columns of a cloister. Between them, rounded masses of foliage hang in deep viridian and olive, stacked high against the sky. Vallotton gives the leaves weight and edges, each clump drawn with a contour a woodcut artist would recognize. Light enters but barely lands. The floor of the wood stays a low strip of mossy tone, shadowed and still. Nothing moves in this forest. The stillness is the point, and it is what the eye keeps returning to.

Vallotton was a Swiss-born painter who joined the Nabis in Paris in the early 1890s, a circle that included Bonnard and Vuillard. The group pursued flatness on purpose, borrowing from Japanese woodblock design and Gauguin's synthetic color. Vallotton pushed furthest toward the graphic. His landscapes often feel composed rather than observed, nature arranged into planes and outlines. Sous Bois sits squarely in that project. It is a woodland subject treated as a pattern problem, and the tension between the two is what gives it character.

Pattern Over Perspective in the 1890s

The Nabis formed in the late 1880s around a simple conviction inherited from Gauguin, that a painting is first a surface covered with colors in a chosen order, not a window onto depth. They took their name from a Hebrew word meaning prophet, half in jest, and set about flattening French painting. Interiors became zones of pattern. Landscapes became arrangements of shape. Academic perspective, the pride of the previous century, was treated as optional. Vallotton, older than most of the group and trained in the academic system he would abandon, brought a draftsman's discipline to the rebellion.

What holds attention here is the exchange between the two ways of seeing. Step back and the picture resolves into a believable wood, cool and dense. Step close and it dissolves into clumps and bands, a design in green. The eye travels between those readings without settling. That oscillation is why the image rewards daily company. It behaves differently in morning light than in lamplight, and it never quite finishes explaining itself.

How the Flatness Is Built

The Trunks as Structure

The vertical trunks do the compositional work. They are painted as simple tapered bands, darker along one edge, lighter along the other, with just enough modeling to read as bark. At arm's length you can see how little information Vallotton needed. A line, a shadow side, a slight widening at the base. The spacing is deliberate, uneven enough to feel found, regular enough to hold the picture together like the ribs of a fan.

Foliage in Contour

Every leaf mass is outlined, a habit carried over from Vallotton's celebrated woodcuts of the same decade. The contours are confident and closed, giving each clump of foliage the crisp edge of a cut shape. Up close the greens separate, viridian against olive against a darker shade where masses overlap. The effect is closer to appliqué than to leaf painting, and it is the single most distinctive thing about the surface.

Color Held in Reserve

The palette is narrow and disciplined. Greens dominate, umber carries the trunks, and a muted moss tone closes the ground. There is almost no pure light in the picture, no bright sky beyond a pale suggestion between the crowns. That restraint is what lets the work settle a room rather than compete with one. It is a dark, cool image, and its darkness is even, never muddy.

More Works by Felix Vallotton

Further works by Felix Vallotton in the Auvrique collection.

Felix Vallotton

Breithorn

View edition

Felix Vallotton

Breithorn

View edition

Felix Vallotton

Jungfrau

View edition

Felix Vallotton

Jungfrau

View edition

You May Also Love

Canvas

Robert Henri

Santa Fe Adobes

Framed Poster

Suzanne Valadon

Portrait of Bernard Lemaire's Mother

Framed Poster

Benjamin Brown

Poppies, Antelope Valley