Soir, Côte de Grâce

"Soir, Côte de Grâce" (Evening, Côte de Grâce) of 1917 depicts the Côte de Grâce, a hillside area near Honfleur on the Normandy coast — a location associated with an earlier generation of French painters, including Corot and the Barbizon school, who had established it as an important landscape site. Vallotton's engagement with Normandy was sustained across several painting campaigns, and the evening light of the Côte de Grâce provided the kind of tonal drama he could render in his flat, controlled manner: the shift from warm-lit middle distance to darker foreground, the sky moving from light to dusk tone. The 1917 date places this wartime landscape within the same body of work as the Alpine glacier paintings and the coastal views — private, concentrated observations of natural sites while the war continued elsewhere. The absence of figures and of any reference to contemporary events is consistent with Vallotton's approach to landscape.

Oil on canvas with smooth handling. Evening light is conveyed through a controlled tonal structure — warm, lighter tones in the sky and middle distance, deepening values in the foreground — without the broken colour or atmospheric haze associated with Impressionist handling of evening effects. The hillside's vegetation is resolved into broad colour masses.