Oignons et soupière

Painted in 1925, the year of Vallotton's death, this still life of onions and a soup tureen belongs to his late series of kitchen and domestic objects — canvases that applied his rigorously simplified vision to the most ordinary subjects of daily life. The onion had a long history in European still life painting, from seventeenth-century Dutch trompe-l'oeil to Cézanne's late table-top arrangements, but Vallotton's treatment strips the subject of both illusion and sentiment, presenting it with the cool, slightly unnerving directness that characterises his entire mature output. The soup tureen introduces a domestic vessel of considerable formal presence — rounded, glazed, light-reflecting — that provided an opportunity for the smooth, almost enamel-like paint application he favoured. Together, the humble onion and the bourgeois tureen create a still life that is simultaneously ordinary and faintly strange.

Oil on canvas using Vallotton's late, highly refined technique: flat colour areas bounded by firm, precise edges, with virtually no visible brushwork on the final surface. The onions' papery skins are described through layered warm ochres without textural surface marks. The tureen's glazed ceramic surface is rendered with smooth gradations that suggest reflected light without the flickering highlights of Impressionist object painting.