The Old Concierge

In 1893 Vallotton was best known not as a painter but as a printmaker, cutting his scenes down to flat blocks of black and white with almost no grey between them. That same unsentimental eye is here, turned on an old concierge, the doorkeeper who sat in the entrance lodge of a Paris apartment house and watched everyone come and go. Vallotton gives him no story and no flattery, just the plain attention of someone recording a face exactly as it is. He painted it the year he joined the Nabis, the circle of young painters around Pierre Bonnard, when he was still living more from his prints than from his brush.