The Lie

Executed on cardboard in 1898, "The Lie" is one of Vallotton's most celebrated interior scenes, dissecting bourgeois domestic theatre with surgical precision. Two figures occupy a shadowy room: a seated woman and a standing man whose body language encodes the tension of a concealed truth. The painting belongs to Vallotton's "Intimités" series, a sequence of small-format oil studies exploring the dramas — desire, deception, jealousy — playing out behind respectable drawing-room facades. Vallotton had made his reputation in the 1890s with woodcuts satirising Parisian social life, and the same dry irony permeates these painted interiors. The cardboard support, matte and unforgiving, suits the work's cold emotional register. Collected by the Baltimore Museum of Art, it has become a touchstone in discussions of Nabi psychological painting. The title, attached rather than read off any obvious visual cue, functions as an instruction: we understand that what we see is performance rather than truth, and Vallotton refuses to tell us who is lying or what has been said.

Oil on cardboard, which produces a matte, absorbent surface very different from canvas. The paint layer is thin, enhancing the flatness Vallotton pursued in his Nabi period. Outlines are firm and deliberate; shadows are simplified into flat zones rather than gradated transitions. Colour is keyed low, with blacks and deep browns dominating.