Félix Vallotton

Félix Vallotton made silence look dangerous. A Swiss painter who settled in Paris and joined the Nabis, the young brotherhood around Bonnard and Vuillard, he is remembered above all for reviving the woodcut, cutting scenes down to stark blocks of flat black and white with almost no grey between them. His print series of couples, called Intimacies, shows men and women in shadowed rooms, and something has clearly gone wrong between them, though he never says what.

That same unease runs through his paintings. His interiors are tidy, smooth and airless, his colours cool, his figures caught in small moments of tension: a whispered confidence, a turned back, a hand on a doorframe. Everything is calm on the surface and off underneath.

He married into a wealthy art-dealing family, which freed him from money worries and, he sometimes complained, from the edge of struggle. He kept painting flat, enamel-smooth nudes and landscapes until his death in Paris in 1925, the day after his 60th birthday.