Designing with To remember Andelys

This is a picture for a hallway, study or stair landing, somewhere with a clear stretch of wall and a reason to pause. The larger size carries a sofa wall or a desk wall on its own; the smaller one sits well above a console or a pair of chairs. The palette is chalk white, slate blue and field green, with small red notes, so it sits cleanly against grey, off-white or warm wood. Hang it at eye level in a room with side light, since the flat planes read best without glare. It pairs naturally with maps, old letters and other objects collected from travel, which suits a painting titled as an act of remembering.

To remember Andelys, Seen from Memory

Picture a study in late afternoon. A desk, a stack of letters, one long image above the shelving. That is the room this painting was made for. Vallotton built Les Andelys from distance and recollection, so the scene arrives already settled, like a place you have visited and can picture with your eyes closed. The Seine bends wide. Chalk bluffs hold the horizon. Red roofs sit scattered at the foot of the hill, small and certain.

Vallotton spent the 1890s making woodcuts with almost no shading, cutting a face or a street into a few decisive shapes. He carried that economy into landscape. Here the fields become bands of green, the water a slab of slate, every poplar and chimney traced with a firm outline. It is the discipline of the printmaker applied to a river valley, and it gives the picture its calm authority.

Vallotton and the Nabi Way of Seeing

Vallotton belonged to the Nabis, the Paris group that included Bonnard and Vuillard, painters who took from Gauguin the idea that a landscape could be arranged rather than copied. The Nabis flattened space, thickened contour and treated colour as design. Vallotton pushed that furthest. His pictures of the period read like careful engravings translated into oil, each element given its own clean boundary.

What holds attention here is the tension between the flat treatment and the real place. You can read the terrain precisely, the bluff, the bend, the town, yet nothing recedes the way a conventional landscape would. The eye keeps moving between depth and pattern, and that movement never tires. It is the reason the picture survives daily looking. A view this ordered gives a room a fixed point of rest.

Flat Planes and a Hard Contour

The Outlined Shape

Stand close and the first thing you notice is the line. Each poplar, chimney and roof is enclosed by a contour laid down with no hesitation, the way a woodblock cutter works. There is almost no modelling inside the shapes. A tree is a dark silhouette against pale chalk. This is what gives the picture its graphic punch at arm's length and its stillness from across the room.

Colour in Bands

Vallotton organises the valley into horizontal registers. Green field, slate river, pale bluff, open sky. The colours sit next to each other rather than blending, so each band reads as a single decision. Notice how the red roofs break the green in small, evenly spaced notes. That rhythm is the composition. It keeps a large surface from ever feeling empty on a wall.

Light Without Shadow

There is little cast shadow and almost no atmospheric haze. The scene is lit evenly, as memory lights a place rather than as weather does. Shadows under the bluffs are flat, unbroken planes of tone. The result is a picture that looks the same at noon or under lamplight, which is exactly why it behaves so well in a room that changes through the day.

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

View edition

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