Characterized by broad masses of black and white with minimal detail, they include street scenes, bathers, portraits, and a series of ten interiors titled Intimités (Intimacies) that portray charged domestic encounters between men and women.

He also began to attend the drawing classes of the painter Jean-Samson Guignard, normally reserved for the most advanced students, where he showed a particular skill in close observation and realism.

In the same year, Vallotton succeeded in the rigorous competition to enter the École des Beaux-Arts, but decided instead to remain at the Académie Julian, where his friends were.

[3] In 1885 the methodical Vallotton began keeping a notebook, called his Livre de Raison, in which he listed all of his paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints.

[3] In the same year he presented his first works at the Paris Salon, the Ingresque Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach, as well as his first painted self-portrait, which received an honorable mention.

[7] The meticulous style of painting seen in the works of Vallotton's early period reached its zenith in The Patient, a canvas in which his companion, Hélene Chatenay, portrays an invalid.

[8] In 1892, he became a member of Les Nabis, a semi-secret, semi-mystical group of young artists, mostly from the Académie Julian, which included Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Édouard Vuillard, with whom Vallotton was to form a lifelong friendship.

[10] Vallotton's paintings in this period reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail.

Examples of his Nabi style are the deliberately awkward Bathers on a Summer Evening (1892–93), now in the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the symbolist Moonlight (1895), in the Musée d'Orsay.

One of his prominent patrons was Thadée Natanson, the publisher of the Revue Blanche, and his wife Misia, who commissioned many important decorative works from the Nabis.

Through the Natansons, Vallotton was introduced to the avant-garde elite of Paris, including Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel Proust, Eric Satie, and Claude Debussy.

He usually depicted types rather than individuals, eschewed the expression of strong emotion, and "fuse[d] a graphic wit with an acerbic if not ironic humor".

[12] Vallotton's graphic art reached its highest development in Intimités (Intimacies), a series of ten interiors published in 1898 by the Revue Blanche, which deal with tension between men and women.

[13] Vallotton's woodcuts were widely disseminated in periodicals and books in Europe as well as in the United States, and have been suggested as a significant influence on the graphic art of Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

One source of the division was the Dreyfus affair, the case of a Jewish army officer falsely accused of aiding the Germans.

[16] Another major event during this period was his marriage in 1899 to Gabrielle Rodrigues-Hénriques, the widowed daughter of Alexandre Bernheim, one of the most successful art dealers in Europe and founder of the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune.

He also established a solid relationship with the Bernheim family and their gallery, which presented a special exhibition devoted to the Nabis, including ten of his works.

He also presented a painting, Three women and a girl playing in the water, at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, which received good reviews.

He made a trip to Italy with Gabrielle, and on his return painted The Turkish Bath, which was praised by among others the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire.

[19] Vallotton's paintings of the post-Nabi period had admirers, and were generally respected for their truthfulness and their technical qualities, but the severity of his style was frequently criticized.

[20] Typical is the reaction of the critic who, writing in the March 23, 1910 issue of Neue Zürcher Zeitung, complained that Vallotton "paints like a policeman, like someone whose job it is to catch forms and colors.

The sketches he produced became the basis for a group of paintings, The Church of Souain in Silhouette among them, in which he recorded with cool detachment the ruined landscape.

The paintings, using tempera on cardboard, used the Nabi trademark method of flat areas of color, and the Nabi-influenced use of aerial and other unusual perspectives taken from Japanese prints.

I want to construct landscapes entirely based on the emotions that they have created in me, a few evocative lines, one or two details, chosen, without a superstition of the exactitude of the hour or the lighting.

[33] Sympathetic to the anarchist movement in his youth, Vallotton was an intense critic of Parisian life and values of the Paris upper class in the Belle Époque.

In the 1890s as a Nabi, he contributed many satirical illustrations to radical revues such as Assiette au beurre and Le Cri de Paris.

He wrote in his journal on August 13, 1919: "More than ever the object amuses me; the perfection of an egg; the moisture on a tomato; the striking (martelage) of a hortensia flower; these are the problems for me to resolve.

Speaking of portraits in general, Vallotton wrote: "Human bodies, like faces, have their own individual expressions, which reveal, by their angles, their folds, their wrinkles, the joy, the pain, the boredom, the worries, the appetites, and the physical decay imposed by work, and the corrosive bitterness of voluptuousness.

[37] In the western world, the relief print, in the form of commercial wood engraving, had long been utilized mainly as a means to accurately reproduce drawn or painted images and, in later years, photographs.

Vallotton's woodcut style was novel in its starkly reductive opposition of large masses of undifferentiated black and areas of unmodulated white.