Bibliography
Katia Poletti (ed.), Félix Vallotton illustrateur. Catalogue raisonné en ligne, Lausanne, Fondation Félix Vallotton, Lausanne/Zurich, Institut suisse pour l’étude de l’art (SIK-ISEA), 2025.
Hervé Joubeaux et Hélène Oblin (ed.), Portraits de Mallarmé, de Manet à Picasso, exb. cat. Vulaines-sur-Seine, Musée départemental Stéphane Mallarmé, 2013.
Marie-Pierre Salé, « Le Livre des Masques : « ‘‘Je ne vois pas ce qui est ; ce qui est, c’est ce que je vois’’», in Édouard Papet, Masques. De Carpeaux à Picasso, Paris, Hazan, musée d’Orsay, 2008 : 136-145.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Félix Vallotton produced some four hundred portraits of well-known subjects, mostly his contemporaries. The small Indian ink sketches were commissioned by press publications like Le Mercure de France, La Revue des Revues, and Le Cri de Paris. Destined for photomechanical reproduction, they all followed the same basic style, with the strongly contrasting areas of black and white typical of wood engraving – a technique Vallotton had mastered by the early 1890s.
This prolific body of work is generally known collectively as Vallotton’s masques, a name suggested by the poet and novelist Rémy de Gourmont when publishing his Livre des Masques. Portraits symbolistes (two volumes, 1896 and 1898), which featured fifty-three such portraits. Vallotton immediately agreed, his own quest for the essence of his sitters matching de Gourmont’s own anti-naturalist leanings and mistrust of trivial details.
Vallotton produced three masques of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. The first, with eyes closed, is reproduced as a printer’s ornament in the Revue franco-américaine for July 1895. The second, with eyes half-closed against a cloud background, was printed in red in the American publication The Chap Book in August 1895. The third – this work – was included in the first volume of de Gourmont’s Livre des Masques.
Vallotton typically worked from photographs, but unusually, Mallarmé’s three portraits were drawn from life. The portrait session – probably the first time the two men met – took place at Mallarmé’s home on March 2, 1895. Mallarmé confirmed the appointment in a letter: “Dear Mr. Vallotton, I am replying while in the grip of a cloacal cold, which my head is still in too deep to show you, but I suppose I will be […] combed and my nose blown enough for Saturday”.