Valdemārs Tone’s purposeful life journey reveals him not just as a brilliant painter but also a beloved professor at the Art Academy of Latvia and a personality highly esteemed by his peers and contemporaries.
What makes Tone a serious and distinguished portrait painter is his power to add to that dispassionate delight in material objects that is the essence of the still-life painter's vision, a certain brooding, human quality. In the age that has moved so far from humanism that is a rare gift. That is what gives to his portraits and nudes a richness of content as well as of form and surface: and that is what makes it possible to place him in the same category as Rembrandt.
Edvarts Virza