L'Entrecôte

Painted in 1914, 'L'Entrecôte' (The Steak) belongs to Vallotton's series of kitchen and dining subjects — paintings that subjected the mundane materials of bourgeois domestic life to the same cold, precise scrutiny he applied to the female nude and the landscape. The entrecôte steak was a specifically French middle-class subject: the cut of beef, the quality of its cooking, and the way it was served on the table were embedded in a detailed social code. Vallotton's kitchen and food paintings have a slightly sinister quality — the flesh of the meat, the implements of preparation, the domestic scene organised around consumption — that sits uneasily with the genre's tradition of abundance and appetising display. Painted in the year of the First World War's outbreak, the image of prepared meat on a table acquires an involuntary charge in its historical context, though there is no evidence Vallotton intended such an association.

Oil on canvas with Vallotton's characteristically smooth, hard-edged technique. The raw or cooked meat is described with precise attention to its specific colour — the deep reds and browns of beef — without the textural freedom that Impressionist or Expressionist painters would bring to such a subject. Any accompanying elements on the table (plate, knife, tablecloth) are rendered with the same cool objectivity as the meat itself.