The first step was to enlist the support of the Fondation Vallotton in Lausanne, the city of the artist’s birth. Photo: © Nora Rupp/Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne Self-portrait at the Age of Twenty (1885), Félix Vallotton. Smaller and more focused than the Paris exhibition, it will be presented in the Sackler Wing of Galleries in June, and will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in the autumn. And for some years at the Royal Academy, we had talked about doing a Vallotton show then a major retrospective held at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2013 was an opportunity to see many of his works together, and provided the spur we needed to think about making a show ourselves. On occasional trips to Switzerland, I had been captivated by his work on view at the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva.

So I was thrilled by the chance to stage an exhibition on this ‘very singular Vallotton’, as Thadée Natanson, co-founder of the avant-garde cultural journal La Revue blanche, described him in the early 1890s. In Britain, apart from an exhibition of his prints put on by the Arts Council in 1976, there has never been a major show of his work. Although Vallotton has always been admired in his native Switzerland – the majority of his works remain in Swiss museums and private collections – he has received scant recognition elsewhere.

This highly individual artist has never received the attention bestowed on his more famous ‘brethren’ in the Nabis group, Bonnard and Vuillard. I have always been intrigued by Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) – by his strangeness, his acerbic wit, his offbeat colour, and his odd position outside the mainstream artistic currents of his time.

Vallotton le bon marché