The Red Room, Etretat

Felix Vallottons The Red Room, Etretat from 1899 is a painting of radical chromatic and compositional intensity that depicts an interior dominated by an expanse of red so overwhelming that the room itself seems to become the color rather than merely containing it. Vallotton, a Swiss-born painter who became a central member of the Nabi group, was the most graphic and angular of the Nabi painters, and The Red Room demonstrates his ability to flatten space and intensify color to a degree that anticipates the Fauve paintings of Matisse and Derain by several years. The composition is organized by strong vertical and horizontal lines that divide the canvas into rectangular zones of red, blue, and white with the precision of a graphic designer, while a figure at a window provides a focal point that anchors the chromatic turbulence. The setting is Etretat, the Normandy coastal town that had been a magnet for painters since the mid-19th century, but Vallotton shows no interest in the dramatic cliffs and sea that attracted Monet and Courbet. Instead, he turns his attention to the interior, where the red walls and furniture create an environment so chromatically intense that it seems to exclude the outside world. The painting on artist's board rather than canvas contributes to its matte, flat surface, which Vallotton preferred for the way it suppresses brushwork and emphasizes the flatness of the color planes.

Vallottons interior paintings are among the most chromatically radical works of the 1890s, pushing flatness and color intensity beyond the achievements of his fellow Nabi painters and anticipating the Fauve revolution of 1905-06. His influence on the development of modernist interior painting extends from Matisse to Hockney.

An interior of overwhelming chromatic intensity by Vallotton in which the red room seems to become the color itself rather than merely containing it, anticipating Fauve painting through radical flattening and graphic compositional structure.