The eleventh sheet

The last sheet in Félix Vallotton’s album Intimités is not a picture of anything. It is ten black rectangles in two columns of five: a kiss, a library, a woman’s face above a pillow, striped curtains, a man in a hat beside a candle. Each is a piece of wood sawn out of one of the ten blocks that had just printed the album, printed once more, all together. None of the fragments carries a title.¹

It was a guarantee, and it had been promised in advance. The first announcement of the album, in La Revue Blanche of 15 September 1898, ended: “Les planches originales seront détruites et une épreuve de garantie accompagnera chaque collection”, the original blocks will be destroyed, and a proof of guarantee will go with each set.² The destruction was part of what the buyer paid for.

Ten couples, ten titles

The album came out in November 1898 from the publishing house of La Revue Blanche in Paris.³ Each of the ten woodcuts shows a man and a woman indoors: on a sofa, at a desk, beside a bed, at a dinner that has stopped. Each carries its title cut into the block, in capitals without accents, with the monogram FV in the opposite corner.⁴

The first is LE MENSONGE, the lie. A woman leans over a man on a dark sofa and rests her face against his cheek; his eyes are closed. The title says that one of the two is lying. The picture does not say which. The art historian Mary Alexandra Sipper put the mechanism simply: without their titles the images are harmless, and with them they are not.⁵

Pear wood and a knife

The printing trade of the day engraved the hard end grain of boxwood with a burin, in fine grey lines fit for reproducing paintings. Vallotton cut along the grain, on the plank side of soft pear wood, with a knife. That method cannot make a grey. It gives a solid black and a solid white, and nothing in between.⁶ In 1892 the critic Octave Uzanne called him a néo-xylographe, cutting scenes of contemporary life that appear “presque en ombres chinoises”, almost as shadow puppets.⁷

Look at the fifth print, L’Argent, money. More than two thirds of it is flat black, with nothing in it. A woman in a white dress stands by a balcony window, the only light area in the picture. Out of the black come just the head and one hand of a man, at the height of her shoulder.⁸

Thirty copies

At the foot of each sheet Vallotton wrote in pencil t. à 25 ép., printed in twenty-five impressions, and the number of the copy. The edition was in fact thirty: twenty-five on wove paper and five on Japan paper, announced at 150 and 250 francs.⁹ The copy reproduced in the book, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is number 5.¹⁰

Where the pieces came from

The fragments on the eleventh sheet carry no labels, so we measured. On the scans of copy number 5, every fragment was compared with all ten prints. Each one turns up in exactly one of them: a match of 0.94 to 0.99 with its own print, and never more than 0.66 with any other.¹¹

The measurement shows something more. All ten fragments are about the same size, half the width of a block, and all come from the upper part of their blocks, the top strip or the one just below it. That is why no title survives: the titles are cut near the bottom. Why those pieces and not others, none of the sources we read explains. No letter survives that tells how Vallotton made the series.¹²

After the wood

On 31 December 1898, a month after the album, Vallotton wrote to his brother that he was painting and nothing else: “fais de la peinture exclusivement”.¹³ On 10 May 1899 he married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, born Bernheim, the daughter of Alexandre Bernheim, one of the great picture dealers of Paris.¹⁴ A few months earlier, one of his ten couples had been called L’Argent. From 1899 he cut less and less wood, and in 1902 he gave up printmaking.¹⁵

He took one print with him into paint. A picture on board in the Baltimore Museum of Art, also called Le Mensonge, keeps the title, the composition and the striped wallpaper of the woodcut, and adds red: the tablecloth, the armchair, the dress, the cheeks.¹⁶

The book

Black on wood is built around the eleventh sheet. It opens with it at actual size and then numbers every fragment with the print it was cut from. The ten follow in the order of the catalogue raisonné, each at its actual size, reproduced from copy no. 5 with no adjustment, the library’s stamp left where it is. Each gets a page that tells you where to look, with the piece of its block that survived, and then one detail enlarged. The Baltimore painting is told rather than shown: the woodcut, and opposite it what Leïla Jarbouai wrote about the painting in 2025. The last chapter follows the wood through Vallotton’s life, to the six woodcuts of 1915–16 that were his last.¹⁷

Vallotton printed the eleventh sheet as proof that the album could not be printed again. The book puts every piece of it back where it came from.