Provenance
Private collection, France;
Private collection, New York (1970 – 2017)
Literature
Jean Valtat, Louis Valtat: Catalogue de l’Oeuvre Peint,
1869-1952, Paris, 1977, vol. I, p. 153, no. 1371.
Louis Valtat (fig. 1a) was an artist who over a long career worked in several styles and knew most
of the significant masters of his time, including the older Impressionists such as Renoir, who even
did his portrait (fig. 1b). Born in Dieppe into a well off family and raised in Versailles not far from
Paris, Valtat was encouraged by his father, an amateur landscape painter, to pursue art. So in 1887
he moved to Paris to attend the École des Beaux-Arts and had a very traditional training with the
esteemed master Gustave Moreau. Then he studied at the more liberal Académie Julian and
became acquainted with the young Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, and Eduard Vuillard who were
to become the core of a group known as the “Nabis” (prophets). Like them, he developed at the
time a style of simple forms and bright colors, applied in bold patterns. In 1894 he collaborated
on theatrical designs with Toulouse-Lautrec. Establishing himself as an independent artist in
1890, Valtat began exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants in 1893. His Landscape with Figure
and Boat of 1899 (fig. 2a) shows him working in an Impressionist manner with bright dabs of pure
color.
Valtat suffered from tuberculosis and to stay healthy spent many fall and winter seasons on the
Mediterranean coast. It was there in 1900 that he became friendly with Renoir. That same year he
signed a contract (which lasted until 1912) with the canny dealer Ambroise Vollard, who said
prophetically: “Have patience. One day Valtat will be perceived as a great painter.”1 At about the
same time he also met in Saint-Tropez Paul Signac, who had been one of the chief Pointillists and
was now working in a vivid, free manner. It was also then that Valtat became what has been called
“a proto-Fauve,” intensifying his use of strong color for both his figure studies (fig. 2b) and
landscapes. In the 1905 Salon he, in fact, exhibited with the painters who were from that moment
to be labeled as “Fauves” (wild beasts) for the violence of their brilliant, undiluted use of color.
Although some authorities such as Renée Huyghe have not included Valtat as a Fauve,2 others
such as Françoise Cachin assert that Valtat was and always remained a Fauve.3 However, unlike
such fellow Fauves as Matisse and Derain, Valtat despite the power of his color, did not pursue an
aggressive course, but tempered his approach with influences from many sources including Puvis
de Chavannes, van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and the Nabis. He preferred to be independent, or as
Raymond Cogniat (the most sensitive writer on Valtat) observed “detached,”4 producing his many
interior scenes and flower compositions. Valtat continued in this manner as a prolific painter and
print maker until failing eyesight forced him to cease working in 1948.
It is perhaps best to see Valtat, as has been suggested by several writers, as “an intermediary”5
between the Nabis and the Fauves, and he certainly found inspiration for the subject matter of the
present painting in the works of Vuillard (figs. 3a -f), whose mother was a corset and dressmaker
and ran her business out of her home. Valtat followed his example and made depictions of women
sewing one of his favorite themes. From as early in his career as 18966 onward, gentle, intimate
scenes of women, often his older sister or his wife, Suzanne Noël, whom he married in 1900, were
to be frequently seen stitching, knitting, or embroidering, (figs. 4a-i), usually in interiors but even
at the beach.7
Shortly after 1915 when Valtat and his family moved into an apartment at 32 avenue Wagram in
Paris, which was across from a dress making shop, scenes evoking the workaday atmosphere of
this atelier became frequent in his paintings until about 1926. This series of works are almost a
photographic documentation of the gestures and activities of the dress makers. In this example of
1918 rendered in bright, direct colors the two women are not actually engaged in the act of sewing
but are examining the quality of the material held between them. In graphic fashion the figures are
outlined in black with little attempt to give them individuality. Rather, set in a constricted cozy
space, with the areas of luminous color recalling the effect of stained glass, this is a work about the
relationship of forms and, as in his contemporary still lives (fig. 4), the lively, sinuous patterns,
which Valtat balances with consummate mastery. As Cogniat summed it up: “Coming at a period
that often delighted in confusion, Valtat’s art is an admirable example of integrity suffused with
the joy of life.”8