The Red Room

The Red Room (La Chambre rouge) is a tempera-on-cardboard painting by the Swiss artist Félix Vallotton, signed and dated 1898, in the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne.

Vallotton made his name in the 1890s with woodcuts, above all the Intimités series of ten scenes from the private life of a modern couple, published in December 1898. For an exhibition shared with the Nabis at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris in March 1899, he showed a painted counterpart: six Interiors with Figures, of which The Red Room is the first. The museum sees the series as the core of his art at the turn of the century. The title is descriptive but may also allude to August Strindberg's 1879 novel of the same name, a sharp attack on bourgeois hypocrisy.

Nearly everything in the room is red: walls, carpet, armchairs, the curtains around the mirror and the bright tablecloth, lit by a strong light from the right. In the dark doorway at left a bearded man holds a woman's hand to his chest while she bows her head. On the table lie black gloves, a crumpled handkerchief, a small purse and a parasol, details the museum reads as clues that the woman has come to a secret meeting; it interprets the picture as Vallotton's denunciation of adultery, painted when he was himself about to marry. A bust of Vallotton stands on the mantelpiece between two yellow bouquets, and the mirror behind it reflects, without reversing it, Édouard Vuillard's Large Interior with Six Figures of 1897, a painting about an adulterous affair within Vuillard's own circle.

The board measures 50 × 68.5 cm. Vallotton passed it in 1908 to Georges Hasen in Saint Petersburg; it later went through the Galerie Vallotton in Lausanne and was bought by Fernand Cardis in 1937. The Lausanne museum acquired it in 1983 (inventory 1983-067).