Marthe Mellot

By 1906 the magazine La Revue blanche had been closed for three years, yet the circle around it had not scattered. Three brothers, the Natansons, had run it, and it had published Vallotton's work in the 1890s. Here he paints the actress Marthe Mellot, married to the youngest brother, Alfred Natanson, who wrote for the stage. She sits in an armchair against a plain, pale ground, turned slightly away, with a faint half-smile and her eyes on something outside the picture. The most worked part of the canvas is her clothing, a heavy cream lace collar spread over dark fabric scattered with pink flowers. His signature and a two-figure date sit at the top right. Mellot kept acting for decades, into the sound films of the 1930s and 1940s, and the portrait reached the Louvre as a gift in 1951.