Moonlight

This is a small canvas, about 27 by 41 centimetres. Vallotton painted it around 1895, when he and his friends among the Nabis, a group of young Paris painters, were reducing nature to flat, decorative shapes. The moon sits in a scatter of small ochre clouds, a heavy brown cloudbank rolls in beside it, and the land below is almost black, with a single little tree on the horizon. Across the dark plain curves a pale band of water that repeats the moon and its clouds as flat patches, like a second sky laid on the ground. The picture once belonged to his brother Paul, who ran an art gallery in Lausanne. It was shown in Milan, Zurich and Paris in the 1960s, and the French state bought it in 1979.