Max Rodriguez-Henriques dans l'atelier de Félix Vallotton, son beau-père

This 1900 cardboard depicts Max Rodriguez-Henriques, Vallotton's stepson (the son of his wife Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques née Bernheim), in the painter's studio — an intimate domestic and professional document. Vallotton married Gabrielle in 1899, making this one of the first portraits he made of his new family in the year immediately following the wedding. The image of a child or young person in an artist's studio belongs to a genre of informal family documentation within the European tradition. Vallotton's studio in Paris was a working professional space, and representing his stepson within it established a familial claim over a fundamentally professional environment. The cardboard support and informal compositional quality suggest this was made as a personal image rather than for exhibition. The Collection Rau for UNICEF now holds the work, reflecting the postwar dispersal of significant European paintings into humanitarian institutional collections.

Oil on cardboard with the compact, precise technique Vallotton applied even to informal domestic subjects. The studio setting provides a background of painted canvases, furniture, and equipment rendered with Vallotton's characteristic economy. The figure of the boy occupies the foreground with the solidity and slightly formal quality that even Vallotton's most relaxed portraits tend to maintain.