Portrait Jules Moteley

"Portrait Jules Moteley" of 1886, held at the Kunsthaus Zürich, is a very early work painted when Vallotton was just twenty-one or twenty-two, having arrived in Paris from Lausanne only four years earlier. This makes it one of the earliest portraits in his surviving oeuvre, predating his Nabi formation by nearly a decade and showing the academic realist training he received at the École des Beaux-Arts. Jules Moteley is not an otherwise well-documented figure, and the portrait may record a friend or acquaintance from Vallotton's early Parisian circle. The work stands in instructive contrast to his mature portrait style: the handling here is more conventional, the tonal modelling more gradated and atmospheric, without the enamel-smooth surfaces and flat simplification he would develop in the 1890s. It documents the starting point of a stylistic evolution that would take him from competent academic portraiture to one of the most distinctive interior painters of his generation.

Oil on canvas in an academic realist style, predating Vallotton's Nabi development. The brushwork is more visible and the tonal transitions more gradated than in his mature work. The portrait demonstrates solid academic training in the management of light, form, and likeness without the formal innovations that would characterise his later style.