As Félix Vallotton left his Nabi period behind, he began to move on to larger formats, producing a series of canvases featuring bathing women, allegories, and scenes from mythology. Even on the larger scale, his…

This poster for a ballet at the Académie nationale de musique in Paris is typical of the craze for all things Japanese in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Japan became fashionable following the…

The painting’s warm, velvety, almost acid hues and thick, matte paintwork make it almost glow. It dates from a period when Maurice Denis was moving on from his Nabi period to embrace a new classicism.

Allégorie is the opening lithography in Amour, an illustrated book commissioned by the publisher and art dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1892. When it was eventually published in 1899, it contained thirteen compositions – twelve plates…

Otto Charles Bänninger studied sculpture with Franz Wanger in Zurich before moving to Paris in 1920 to join Émile-Antoine Bourdelle’s studio at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. The following year, he joined Bourdelle’s personal…

Aimé-Jules Dalou, a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and contemporary of Auguste Rodin, was a major French sculptor in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He turned his back on the idealised style adopted by…

September 24, 1859. The Lake Geneva tugboat operating company launches the Mercure in Morges harbour as a crowd of onlookers claps and cheers. The steamship, designed by the famous Zurich-based shipbuilders Escher, Wyss & Cie,…

François Keiserman arrived in Rome in 1789, financed by the Vaud-based art entrepreneur Louis Ducros who had hired him as a watercolourist at his rapidly expanding engraving studio. Keiserman soon specialised in veduti, or topographical…

Auguste de Niederhaüsern studied industrial art and fine art in Geneva before moving to Paris in 1886, where he joined the studios of the sculptors Henri Chapu and later Alexandre Falguière. He wanted to study…

Edouard Ravel studied under Barthélemy Menn and Alfred van Muyden and eventually took up a teaching position at the Geneva School of Fine Art himself. Like many other Swiss artists of his generation, he made…