Charles Baudelaire

Vallotton's 1901 portrait of Charles Baudelaire, now held at the Walter Feilchenfeldt Gallery, belongs to his retrospective literary portrait series. Baudelaire, who died in 1867, was the most important poetic predecessor of the Symbolist generation — his "Les Fleurs du Mal" (1857) and "Le Spleen de Paris" (1869) defined the aesthetic, psychological, and social terrain that Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and the Nabis all inhabited. To paint Baudelaire in 1901 was to identify with a specific cultural lineage. The series of literary portraits that Vallotton assembled in 1901–1902 — Baudelaire, Verlaine, Zola, Hugo — maps a precise intellectual genealogy, running from romantic provocateur through naturalist champion of justice to Symbolist poet. Baudelaire's personal connection to visual art — his friendship with Delacroix, his art criticism, his concept of the "peintre de la vie moderne" — made him a particularly apt subject for a painter of modern life like Vallotton.

Oil on canvas, worked from existing photographs and painted portraits since Baudelaire died in 1867. The posthumous portrait has the same fixed, monumental quality as others in the series. Vallotton's smooth technique gives the face clarity of likeness without atmospheric idealisation, appropriate to a subject whose poetry prized clarity and precision.