The most original element of the painting is its typically Fauve freedom in the use of pure, anti-naturalistic colour. 

Louis Valtat was a leading member of the school of French Expressionism that exploded at the renowned Salon d’Automne of 1905 with the group of Fauves led by Henri Matisse and including André Derain, Henri Manguin, Jean Puy, Georges Rouault and Maurice de Vlaminck. A student at the Académie Julian and then a pupil of Gustave Moreau, like Matisse and the others, Valtat made his debut at the Salon des Indépendants in 1893. His early works address subjects associated with the Nabis group and especially those most committed to revitalising the painting of modern life, like Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard (his friend) and to some extent Maurice Denis. Again like them, Valtat was caught up in the life of Montmartre and worked with avant-garde theatres and cabarets. Like his friend Matisse, he was also a sculptor and his works¹ bear the same stylistic imprint, thus demonstrating the equal importance of experimentation with volume and with colour in Fauvism. 

Of great importance for his career was his friendship with Pierre-Auguste Renoir, through whom he came to sign a contract with gallerist Ambroise Vollard, his dealer until 1912.² At the end of the 19th century, following the example of his older friend and indeed of many painters of his own generation, Valtat started to visit the southern coasts of France (Arcachon in Gascony and Saint-Raphaël on the Riviera) and to develop an entirely new approach to landscape painting, above all in chromatic terms. 

A recent addition to the Cerruti Collection (2008), Madame Valtat et son fils (Madame Valtat and Her Son) is a peculiar example of the painter’s style, consisting essentially of a landscape with the figures of a mother and child in the bottom right corner. Clearly evident in the work is an effort to combine and condense the primary points of reference of Post- Impressionist paintings, namely the colour of Gauguin and the spatial construction of Cézanne, as well as the simplification of the Pont-Aven school, the streaky brushstrokes of Van Gogh and the intimate, domestic subject matter of the Nabis. It is also from the latter that the painting draws its marked two-dimensionality and the fin de siècle taste for arabesques combined with brushwork strongly reminiscent of Cézanne but more fluid. 

The most original element of the painting is its typically Fauve freedom in the use of pure, anti-naturalistic colour. Here colour takes on an authentically musical value, which proclaims that the image is independent from nature and is governed by rules completely internal to the painting. This is the fruit of an approach acquired from Moreau and his palette, whose markedly romantic lineage stretches back to Delacroix. Madame Valtat et son fils presents itself, in fact, as a symphony of bright colours in which the mauve of the shadows contrasts with the ochres and yellows of clotted light, while the greens of the foliage enter into dialogue with the dashes of turquoise speckling the rosy background on the left. 

In thematic and stylistic terms, the painting appears to belong to a series featuring Valtat’s wife Suzanne and their son Jean (born in 1908) produced in 1910 and 1911.³ The similarities with La mère et l’enfant au costume rouge (Mother and Child in a Red Costume, fig. 1),⁴ not least as regards the child’s, age, bear out a dating of 1911. 

Matteo Piccioni 

¹ See Sète 2011, pp. 238-239, nos. 64-68. 

² J. Munck, in Sète 2011. 

³ Valtat 1977, vol. I, pp. 100-103. 

⁴ Ibid., p. 102, no. 910.