Unusually for French-speaking Swiss artists of his generation, Benjamin-Samuel Bolomey, a native of Lausanne, emigrated to Holland for a career at the royal court. He trained in Paris, rubbing shoulders with the pupils of François…

Jules Blancpain was born to the famous watchmaking dynasty of the same name and trained in watchmaking in Saint-Imier with a view to joining the family business, until a trip to Florence set him on…

André Lasserre began his career in Paris as a student of Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière before moving to Lausanne in 1951 and turning to constructivist abstraction. While in Paris in…

In 1916, as the First World War was raging, Pablo Picasso designed a stage curtain for Parade. The show with texts by Jean Cocteau and music by Erik Satie, premiered in Paris in 1917 by…

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…