THE UNUSUAL WOODCUTS OF M. FELIX
VALLOTTON: BY GARDNER C. TEALL


UST at a time when we were forgetting that some of
the most interesting examples of the art of the little
school of Pre-Raphaelites were to be found in their
designs for woodcuts,-designs which, in their way,
speak quite as much for the spirit of art-rebellion
that stood forth in the hearts of Watts, Rossetti,


               Iiurne-Jones, Alaclox-lirown, Iiunt, an(t tne rest ot
them, there appeared on the Parisian horizon a young Swiss, Felix
Vallotton, who had been born at Lausanne in eighteen hundred
and sixty-five, Christmas Day. He had struggled along in various
ateliers under French masters almost without success, and had
become so discouraged that even the good luck prophesied to all
Christmas children seemed a thing no longer worth hoping for, when,
and quite to his amazement, one of his portraits received an honor-
able mention from the Salon of eighteen hundred and eighty-five.
   Doubtless he looked upon this somewhat unsubstantial honor as
a rare piece of good fortune. It was as if that restored optimism
to him, but in the work itself there was no luck; the blunderers of
the Salon simply again had honored a mediocre picture. The can-
vas scarcely deserved attention, and it may be said to the credit of
this bodyguard of French painting, that the succeeding committees
of eighteen hundred and eighty-six, eighteen hundred and eighty-
seven, and of eighteen hundred and eighty-nine promptly declined
Vallotton's paintings. They were, without doubt, crude and some-
what violent in color; surely anything but indicative of their painter's
really remarkable abilities in other art-directions. His first success
in the Salon had raised him to that seventh heaven of paint and turpen-
tine whence now he fell with a thud that set him thinking.
   Vallotton had been what most young artists are either too list-
less or too lazy to be, a student of many things. He found himself
interested in Diirer's prints, in Cranach, in the early Italian designers
of woodcuts, and, not least of all, in the woodcuts after the designs
of the little group of Englishmen first mentioned. Mechanical
processes had come to crowd out the graver and his block of pear-
wood, and Vierge was being shown up in zinc. To Vallotton there
was a significance in all this, and he decided to have a little renais-
sance all his own, one which, curiously enough, came close upon
the heels of the English Tsthetic movement in which the journals
both at home and on the continent were finding vast amusement.
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