Concierge

Nobody recorded who this man was. The catalogue title hedges, calling him a grey-bearded man, or a concierge, one of the caretakers who minded the entrance of a Paris apartment house. Vallotton gave him the slow, smooth finish of the old masters, laying in the beard strand by strand and letting the black coat sink into the greenish wall behind. He signed and dated the canvas at the right, and the last digit is hard to read. The Musée d'Orsay gives 1888, while France's national collections database reads it as 1885. Either way, it was 1891 when he sent the portrait to the Salon des artistes français, the big official exhibition held in Paris each spring. The banker and collector David David-Weill gave it to the Louvre in 1930.