Outline, Flatness and Spacing

The Black Outline

At arm's length the first thing to notice is the contour. Each trunk is drawn with a dark edge that stays crisp against the green behind it, a method the Nabis borrowed from cloisonné enamel and Japanese woodcuts. The outline carries the whole structure. There is almost no modelling inside it, no soft turn of light, so each trunk reads as a single deliberate shape rather than a rendered object.

Colour Without Shadow

Vallotton paints the canopy as one even mass of deep green, and the ground beneath it as a paler field warmed by ochre. The light in the picture comes from beneath the leaves, not through them. That inversion is what makes the mood so low and sheltered. Nothing glints. The eye settles instead of hunting, and the picture keeps a room's temperature down rather than up.

Space Between Trunks

The drawing in this work is mostly negative. The intervals between the trunks are varied with real care, some trunks standing apart, others nearly touching, and those gaps create the rhythm a viewer feels before naming it. It is spacing rather than shading that gives the group its resemblance to a family. Step back two metres and the composition resolves into figures in a room.

Flat Colour and the Nabi Habit

In the 1890s a group of young painters in Paris pushed away from naturalism. They called themselves the Nabis, from a Hebrew word for prophet, and they took Gauguin's lesson seriously. Colour could be a block of feeling rather than a record of light. Form could be simplified until it read like a symbol. Vallotton joined them early and became their most austere member.

What holds attention here is restraint. Deep forest green against a paler ground, ochre warming the base where light slips under the leaves, and spacing between the trunks doing the work of drawing. Almost no shadow anywhere. An image this even does not tire the eye, which is why it rewards the tenth year of living with it as much as the first evening.

Vallotton Paints Trees as Company

The trunks are what you see first. Slim verticals outlined in near black, pressed shoulder to shoulder across the picture like guests at a table. Above them the crowns close into a single unbroken canopy, and the title stops being a metaphor. Vallotton called it The Family of Trees because the resemblance is plain to anyone who looks for a moment.

Vallotton worked in the 1890s alongside the Nabis, a group that stripped painting down to flat areas of colour and firm outline. He was Swiss, sharp-eyed, and drawn to ordinary subjects treated with unusual gravity. This canvas sits at the centre of that habit. A stand of trees, nothing dramatic, made to feel like a portrait of people who happen to be wood.

Designing with The Family of Trees

This is a work for the hour when the lamps come on. A study, a reading nook, a hallway that ends in a chair. It asks for quiet company and nothing competing beside it, so keep the wall plain and the furniture low. Linen, oak, deep unbleached tones and a single brass lamp suit it well. Hang it at seated eye level, around 145 centimetres to the centre, and let it hold a corner rather than a whole room. The smaller size fits a nook or a narrow stretch beside a bookcase. The largest, at a metre tall, can anchor a study wall on its own, the trunks reading as figures from across the room. Avoid pairing it with anything bright. Its worth lies in how even it stays under lamplight, night after night, an image that asks nothing and gives back calm. That steadiness is what the price buys.

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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