In 1900, the Swiss painter and print-maker Félix Vallotton was granted French citizenship. He had cut back on his prints to paint more, and the paintings that he made were no longer Nabi, but explored themes and ideas that were to prove influential later in the twentieth century. He also broadened his interests: in the early years of the new century, he wrote eight plays and three novels, although none achieved much success.

In 1900, he followed his earlier mysterious interiors with The Laundress, Blue Room, set in the Vallotton apartment in Paris, with two of his step-children squatting on the folds of large fabric sheets, inside a bedroom with blue decor. Two women are sat working, one apparently on the sheets, the other on separate fabrics.

Vallotton’s view of the oldest of the great bridges of central Paris, in Le Pont Neuf from 1901, is strange. Like some of the unconventional views of bridges painted in the late nineteenth century, its emphasis is on unusual perspective form, but it manages to avoid showing Pissarro’s dense throng of people, or its place among prominent buildings, and is almost unrecognisable.

Woman Searching in a Cupboard from 1901 shuts out half its image with black screens and the doors to the cupboard, giving it a strongly geometric tone. The woman, in spite of a lamp by her side, is little more than a black silhouette too, who appears to absorb the light falling on her. The lamp itself is strange, with a shade showing some sailing ships at sea, its stand being a vertical statuette of Truth, perhaps?

Maybe we should read Vallotton’s lamps more carefully. For the following year (1902), he painted this quartet of gamblers in a Poker session. Tucked away in a plush back-room behind a club or bar, these four are in full evening dress, playing for stakes that could be breathtaking and bankrupting. In the centre foreground is another lamp with a patterned shade, showing sailing boats, I think.

Then in 1902-03, Vallotton painted one of the seminal records of the Nabis: Five Painters, showing Pierre Bonnard (seated, left), Félix Vallotton (standing, left), Édouard Vuillard (seated), Charles Cottet and Ker-Xavier Roussel (standing, right).

His next views of interiors I find quite cinematic, as if stills from a movie, perhaps reflecting his modern approach to composition and lighting, more akin to those developed by cinematographers of the future rather than painters of the past. They also appear to have been influences over the New Objectivity that developed in central Europe in the 1920s, and later American artists like Edward Hopper.

For his Interior, Woman in Blue Searching in a Cupboard from 1903, Vallotton painted his wife Gabrielle from the back as she stood searching in a cupboard of books.

Vallotton’s Interior with Woman in Red from 1903 develops the framing effect of multiple sets of doors, drawing the eye deeper towards a distant bedroom. The woman wearing a red dress looks away, her skirts swept back as if she has been moving towards the three steps dividing this interior into foreground and background. There are tantalising glimpses of detail on the way: discarded fabric on a settee, clothing on a chair in the next room, and half a double bed with a bedside lamp in the distance.

There’s dispute as to whether this painting shows a Woman Reading in an Interior, as given by its French title, or a woman writing, which appears to be its translation. Vallotton painted this in 1904, and charged it with rather less mystery, although I wonder if the lower of the paintings on the wall might be one of Degas’ works showing horseriding. As usual, the single figure doesn’t show her face as she sits at the small bureau, backlit by the window and its stained glass.

Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures from 1904 is one of the last of his series of mysterious interiors, and worthy of the sub-genre of the ‘problem picture’. This is another bedroom, in which the lady of the house is standing over her maid as the latter is sewing up an evening gown for her. The mistress stands with her back to the viewer, but her face is revealed in her reflection in the large mirror on the wardrobe at the back of the room. In that, the maid is all but invisible. These three figures appear in a perspective recession, and to the right of the wardrobe is a doorway, presumably leading through to the master’s bedroom.

In this period before the Great War, Vallotton also painted portraits, and several nudes. But the figurative painting from 1905 that I find most fascinating is this, of The Models’ Smoke Break. In an era when most adults smoked, rest periods for models, like those for other workers, were usually termed ‘smoke breaks’ even though neither woman is smoking.

Instead, one model is reclined in a pose (not a pose, as it’s a break) reminiscent of Manet’s Olympia (1863). Instead of her maid bringing her a bouquet, though, she holds a single wilted blue flower, and chats idly to another model who sits by her feet. I wish I could identify the paintings reflected in the mirror behind them, although I think the upper double portrait is that of Vallotton’s parents painted in 1886. That below looks like a coastal landscape, perhaps of Honfleur.

To follow these, Vallotton turned to classical myths.

Just after Christmas, on 29 December, we will commemorate the centenary of the death of one of the most curious French painters of the time. Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) followed the academic tradition, became one of the Nabis, painted a series of disturbing domestic interiors, and some of the finest landscapes of the early twentieth century. This brief series scratches the surface of his eclectic art.

Félix Édouard Vallotton was born in Lausanne in Switzerland, and moved to Paris in 1882 to study under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Académie Julian. His early influences included the paintings of JAD Ingres, and he started painting portraits following the academic tradition.

Among those early works is this Self-portrait at 20 from 1885.

In the late 1880s he learned to make prints, apparently through his friendship with the Polish artist in his painting of Félix Jasinski in his Printmaking Studio from 1887. Although Jasinski was successful at the time, his work now seems to have been largely forgotten. Vallotton soon became fascinated by Japanese woodcuts, including ukiyo-e that had become so popular in the late nineteenth century. He collected them, and in 1891 started making his own woodcuts.

The year that he left the Académie Julian, he started painting his long series of domestic interiors that could be read as ‘problem pictures’ with open narrative. He began gently with The Visit or The Top Hat, Interior (1887), the year that he also exhibited his first two paintings (both portraits) at the Salon. A top hat and walking stick are parked on a chair just inside an apartment, whose door is partly open. Everything looks in order, except for the painting hanging on the wall at the right, which is at an odd angle.

The Sick Girl from 1892 uses a theme that was popular with Naturalist painters throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s. His model was his muse and lover Hélène Chatenay, whom he had met in 1889. They remained a couple until the late 1890s, and in 1907 she was tragically killed by a car.

His detailed realism here extends to showpiece surface reflections from the glassware and polished wood, but he curiously obscures the face of the young woman in her sickbed by reversing the bed’s normal orientation. Many of his apparently humdrum interiors have unusual twists such as this, adding the strangeness later to be formally exploited in Surrealism. Another odd feature in this painting is that the maid who has just entered the room appears to be heading towards the viewer, and isn’t even looking towards her patient.

The Cook at the Stove, or simply The Cook, from 1892 is another domestic genre scene drawn from Naturalism, and features Hélène Chatenay again. She stands at the solid-top range in a kitchen strangely almost devoid of the one thing that kitchens are for: food. The only edible item visible is a bunch of onions suspended in mid-air. Everything – the chairs, pots and pans, and the range itself – is spotless as if they have never been used, and appear unnatural.

In 1892, Vallotton made lifelong friendships with key members of the Nabis, including Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Édouard Vuillard. Because of his Swiss origins, he was dubbed the Foreign Nabi.

His most overtly Nabi painting is Bathing on a Summer Evening from 1892-93. These flattened and stylised figures representing women of all ages have been applied like collage to a background reminiscent of some of Ferdinand Hodler’s alpine meadows.

In 1893, Vallotton painted his remarkable Waltz, on which he appears to have sprinkled thousands of multi-coloured dots to give its surface a fine sparkle. Couples sweep across an unseen dance floor, embraced in a lover’s waltz, with just one of their faces clearly visible.

Unlike Pierre Bonnard, Vallotton doesn’t appear to have painted many views of Paris, but this Street Scene in Paris from 1895 shows more Nabi style and some overlap with Bonnard’s contemporary motifs, even down to the dog wandering in the middle of the road.

Like the other Nabis, Vallotton became involved with the Natanson brothers, and their magazine Revue Blanche published a series of ten of his prints of interiors in 1898. He provides us with a glimpse into the private life of Misia Natanson, as she was at the time, in his Misia at Her Dressing Table (1898), again in Nabi style.

Vallotton remained under Nabi influence when he painted The Red Room in 1898 to the extent that he used distemper, a traditional medium the group had resurrected. A man and woman stand in a loose embrace in the doorway of a living room with brick red decor. Above the fireplace is what could be a mirror, or a painting, in which a person dressed in black is standing in the distance, apparently looking away from the couple.

A similar well-dressed couple embrace more closely in The Visit from 1899, also painted in distemper. Once again, Vallotton leaves the painting’s underlying narrative open.

As he moved on from his brief affair with the Nabis, and the group itself disintegrated, Vallotton experimented with unusual points of view, as in The Ball from 1899. A young girl is chasing her red ball, as two women talk in the distance. This is seen from mid-air above the girl, forming a simple but compelling motif with an air of mystery.

In the last year of the nineteenth century, he turned to painting landscapes on the north coast of France.

On Dieppe Beach from 1899 reduces this scene as only a printmaker could, to discrete forms filled with colour: the textured sand, sea, sky, and the simplified shapes of the three figures with a parasol.

He even painted one of the formative coastal landscapes of Impressionism, in his Seafront at Étretat (1899). Watching a gathering of fashionable ladies on the promenade is the cyclopean eye of the Manneporte.

In 1899, Vallotton married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, a rich young widow who already had three children. The following year, he was granted French citizenship. In the early years of the new century, he was to concentrate on painting further strange motifs.