Scène de rue

"Scène de rue" (Street Scene) of 1895 belongs to Vallotton's series of urban observations that ran parallel to his celebrated woodcut series depicting Paris crowds, demonstrations, and street life. The mid-1890s were the height of his graphic production, and these painted street scenes share the same democratic, unsentimental gaze: anonymous Parisians observed without hierarchy or picturesque framing. The subject of the modern city was central to Post-Impressionist painting — Toulouse-Lautrec and the Nabis all engaged with it — but Vallotton's approach is colder and more sociological than either the Impressionists' celebration of bourgeois leisure or the Symbolists' atmospheric urban night. His streets are populated with types rather than individuals, observed with the same detachment he would bring to the bourgeois interiors of his later career. The oil painting allowed him to develop chromatic aspects of the street scene that the woodcut's black-and-white format excluded.

Oil on canvas with the flat handling of Vallotton's Nabi period. Figures in the street scene are rendered as simplified silhouettes, their individuality subsumed into type. Spatial recession in the street is controlled through tonal darkening and scale reduction rather than perspectival elaboration.