The Swiss painter and printmaker Félix Vallotton was an intriguing, talented but slippery artist. From painting to painting in “Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet,” a small survey of his career, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you often don’t quite know what to expect next in terms of style or subject, even within the same year.

They begin with the soulful “Self-Portrait at the Age of 20” from 1885, just after three years of study at the Académie Julian in Paris. It shows the artist looking wise beyond his years, already adept at a suavely brushed surface redolent of Manet, Ingres and Degas. In “The Sick Girl,” a sparkling interior scene of 1892, his realist style hardens to such perfection that it dazzles but also seems slightly cold.

At the other extreme is “Street Scene in Paris,” from 1897, which has the flattened, rough-edged shapes of the small Post-Impressionist cohort that called itself the Nabi. The group included the artist’s good friend, Édouard Vuillard, and Vallotton himself, although he didn’t share their preference for images of cozy domesticity. Also from 1897, his portrait “Thadée Natanson,” in which realism takes on a stiffening naïveté that evokes the self-taught French artist Henri Rousseau. Vallotton, who wrote criticism for a newspaper in Lausanne, Switzerland (where he was born in 1865), gave Rousseau an early laudatory review.