One of the powers of a great painter is their ability to transform the everyday into the remarkable, and nowhere is this more apparent than in domestic interiors. These are the places we take for granted, but that didn’t stop Félix Vallotton from making them thoroughly unsettling. Although best-known as one of the Nabis, in this article I look at those masterly interiors.

He started gently with this oil painting of The Visit or The Top Hat, Interior in 1887, the year that he left the Académie Julian and 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.

Two years later, Vallotton met his first partner, Hélène Chatenay, who later came to model for two further domestic interiors he painted in 1892.

The Sick Girl adopts a theme popular with Naturalist painters throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s. He curiously obscures the face of the young woman in her sickbed by reversing the bed’s expected orientation. But who would ever position their bed to face away from a window and look straight at a near-blank wall? 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 also features Hélène Chatenay as his model. 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 thoroughly unnatural.

Vallotton then put his interiors on pause for six years, while he engaged with the Nabis. He also bought himself an early Kodak mass-market camera, and from 1898 experimented with it for capturing these domestic scenes. He changed partners in 1899, when he married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Hénriques, the widowed daughter of Alexandre Bernheim, one of the leading art dealers of the day.

Vallotton remained under Nabi influence when he painted The Red Room in 1898 to the extent that he used distemper, a traditional medium that 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.

In 1900, he followed that with The Laundress, Blue Room, which appears to be 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.

A year later Vallotton’s Woman Searching through a Cupboard (1901) became even stranger. He shuts out half this painting’s image with black screens and the doors to the cupboard, giving 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.

A couple of years later, in his Interior, Woman in Blue Searching in a Cupboard (1903), Vallotton painted his wife Gabrielle from the back as she stood searching in a cupboard of books.

Vallotton’s Interior with the Back of a Woman in Red from 1903 develops the framing effect of multiple sets of doors, drawing the eye deeper towards the distant bedroom. The woman wearing a red dress looks away, her skirts swept back as if she has been moving towards the three steps that divide 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 of a double bed with a bedside lamp in the distance.

In 1904, Vallotton painted what must be one of the last of these disquieting domestic scenes, in Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures. Its narrative is so incomplete that it’s worthy of the sub-genre of the ‘problem picture’. This is another bedroom, where 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, and her face is only 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 perspective recession, and to the right of the wardrobe is a doorway, presumably leading through to the master’s bedroom.

Félix Vallotton’s art moved on.