La Mare

In 1909 Vallotton started making landscapes a new way. Rather than paint outdoors, he took quick sketches and snapshots on the spot, then built the finished picture back in the studio, from memory. He called these his composed landscapes, and this pond near Honfleur, on the Normandy coast, is one of them. Around then he wrote that he dreamed of landscapes freed from any literal respect for nature, recreated only from the feeling they had left in him. You can see what that produced. It is night. The water lies as a flat black plane, with ripples spreading from a single point at the right edge. A bowed arc of long grass fills the left foreground, and behind it the blossom on a tree glows faintly in the dark, the one warm thing in the picture.