To Ibsen (À Ibsen)

A successful painter and printmaker in nineteenth-century France, Félix Vallotton nonetheless could not escape a certain melancholy. This striking woodcut depicts Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828–1906), an influential Norwegian playwright renowned for works of moral analysis staged as harsh representations of middle-class life. Ibsen wrote without regard for a public that he considered petty and pretentious, scandalizing the audiences of A Doll’s House and subsequent plays with his refusal to conform to any traditional happy endings. These disturbing works scrutinized ordinary people who were forced to recognize their true selves—for better or worse—once stripped of the societal masquerade. Both Ibsen and Vallotton sought to unmask the conventions of bourgeois society, especially regarding male-female relations and the place of women. Vallotton’s portrait shows his personality laid bare, accentuating the contrasts of black ink and white paper that are characteristic of woodcut prints. To Ibsen is one of many woodcut portraits of nineteenth-century notables that Vallotton made, not from life but in a spirit of distant homage. Among his other literary portrait subjects from 1894–95 are Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) and Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881).