Étude de fesses

This is a student exercise. Vallotton had come from Lausanne to Paris as a teenager and enrolled at the Académie Julian, one of the private studios where aspiring painters worked from the live model for hours a day. In 1884 he was about 19 and still doing the required academic grind, and this is simply a close oil study of a model's back, the kind of anatomy drill every student turned out by the dozen. The cool, exact handling is already there. It would be years before he became widely known, first for his stark black-and-white woodcuts and then for the quiet, unsettling interiors of his maturity.