Getting Ready for a Visit, plate eight from Intimacies
Medium
Woodcut in black on cream wove paper
Dimensions
Image: 17.7 × 22.4 cm (7 × 8 7/8 in.); Sheet: 25.1 × 32.5 cm (9 15/16 × 12 13/16 in.)
Classification
woodcut
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
62165
Art Historical Context
Félix Edouard Vallotton a Swiss-born artist associated with the avant-garde Nabis group in late 19th-century Paris, captured fleeting glimpses of everyday intimacy in his seminal 1898 series *Intimacies*. *Getting Ready for a Visit plate eight from this set of 10 woodcuts, offers a voyeuristic peek into a private moment—likely a woman primping before company arrives—rendered with Vallotton's signature economy of line and unflinching gaze. Created amid the fin-de-siècle fascination with modern life and Symbolist introspection, the series challenged conventions by elevating mundane domestic scen...
About the Artist
Félix Edouard Vallotton · 1865–1925
Félix Edouard Vallotton (1865–1925) was a Swiss-French painter and printmaker whose deceptively spare imagery concealed a penetrating psychological acuity and a gift for formal invention. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, he moved to Paris at the age of seventeen to study at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, quickly immersing himself in the city's vital avant-garde scene. By the 1890s he had beco...