Interior, Nude Seen from Behind

The painting Interior, Nude Seen from Behind is one of the early nude portraits that Félix Vallotton did in an interior, a theme that he would take up repeatedly, one that would also mark his mature years as an artist. In a clear composition and warm, harmonious tones, he shows the figure of a woman dressing, or rather undressing, in the light of day, her perfectly styled hair and her gaze directed towards a concealed door, causing us to suspect a secret love affair. But this picture lacks any anecdotal detail that would support this, so that we must assume that the bed and the scattered pieces of clothing are merely the artist’s excuse for staging the nude in the classic manner, from behind. In fact, the painting belongs to a group of works for which, after cultivating a more surface- oriented notion of the nude in the 1890s, Vallotton now, in 1902, turned to a sculptural interpretation, which culminated in a series of small bronzes in 1904.