The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2 Vols ... by Herbert Coleridge

But his unique vision emerged in 1892 with a work of confounding originality: Bathing on a Summer Evening. Another striking early work, The Sick Girl (1892), reveals his allegiance to the Dutch masters of the 17th century. The assurance of his Self-portrait at the Age of Twenty demonstrates his independence and his espousal of a tradition far removed from French Impressionism, the prevailing avant-garde style in Paris at the time, and one rooted in the cool, linear northern European realist tradition – that of Dürer and Holbein.

Arriving in the capital of art in 1882, he attended classes at the informal Académie Julian. He left behind his puritanical, Protestant upbringing in Lausanne when he set off for Paris at the age of 16. Vallotton was an individualist from the beginning. Their assistance in shaping the show and locating works in private collections has been invaluable. This provided the basis for our research for the exhibition. Marina Ducrey, long-time curator of the foundation, and her successor, Katia Poletti, devoted years to producing an exemplary, in-depth catalogue raisonné of Vallotton’s work. The first step was to enlist the support of the Fondation Vallotton in Lausanne, the city of the artist’s birth.

Photo: © Nora Rupp/Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne Self-portrait at the Age of Twenty (1885), Félix Vallotton. Smaller and more focused than the Paris exhibition, it will be presented in the Sackler Wing of Galleries in June, and will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in the autumn.

And for some years at the Royal Academy, we had talked about doing a Vallotton show then a major retrospective held at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2013 was an opportunity to see many of his works together, and provided the spur we needed to think about making a show ourselves. On occasional trips to Switzerland, I had been captivated by his work on view at the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva. So I was thrilled by the chance to stage an exhibition on this ‘very singular Vallotton’, as Thadée Natanson, co-founder of the avant-garde cultural journal La Revue blanche, described him in the early 1890s. In Britain, apart from an exhibition of his prints put on by the Arts Council in 1976, there has never been a major show of his work. Although Vallotton has always been admired in his native Switzerland – the majority of his works remain in Swiss museums and private collections – he has received scant recognition elsewhere. This highly individual artist has never received the attention bestowed on his more famous ‘brethren’ in the Nabis group, Bonnard and Vuillard. I have always been intrigued by Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) – by his strangeness, his acerbic wit, his offbeat colour, and his odd position outside the mainstream artistic currents of his time.

The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2 Vols ... by Herbert Coleridge