Edouard Vuillard was born in Cuiseaux, Saône-et-Loire,
11 Nov 1868 and died in La Baule, near Saint-Nazaire, 21 June
1940.
1. Life and work
(i) Early work, to 1900
He was brought up in Paris in modest circumstances,
and his home life was closely involved with his mother’s
and elder sister’s dressmaking work. He attended the Lycée
Condorcet where his contemporaries included the musician Pierre
Hermant and the writer Pierre Véber, as well as Maurice
Denis. His closest friend was Ker-Xavier Roussel, and, on leaving
school in 1885, Roussel encouraged Vuillard to join him at the
studio of the painter Diogène Maillart (1840–1926),
where they received the rudiments of artistic training. Vuillard
began to frequent the Louvre and soon determined on an artistic
career, breaking the family tradition of a career in the army.
In March 1886 Vuillard entered the Académie
Julian where he was taught by Tony Robert-Fleury, and on his third
attempt in July 1887 he passed the entrance examination to the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He was taught by Jean-Léon Gérôme
for a brief period of about six weeks in 1888, but his studies
at the Ecole appear to have been spasmodic. In 1888 Vuillard began
to keep a journal in which he made sketches of works he was studying
in the Louvre and noted ideas about future paintings. From these
sketches and from his earliest-known studies in oil, it is clear
that Vuillard was drawn to the realistic study of still-life and
domestic interiors. He was particularly attracted to the 17th-century
Dutch artists and to the works of Chardin in La Caze collection.
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Paul Sérusier
(1864-1927)
Le Talisman, 1888
Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
In 1889 Vuillard was persuaded by Maurice Denis
to join a small dissident group of art students that had formed
within the Académie Julian around Paul Sérusier
and that referred to itself as the brotherhood of Nabis. Sérusier
had communicated to his fellow students his knowledge of Synthetism
following his contact with Gauguin in Brittany. By means of a
small landscape painted under Gauguin’s instructions, known
as The Talisman (Paris, Mus. d’Orsay; for illustration see
Sérusier, paul), Sérusier demonstrated the Synthetist
method of painting; this entailed a reliance on memory and imagination
rather than direct observation, and the application of forms and
colours reduced to their simplest as equivalents to sensations
and emotions received from nature. At first Vuillard was reluctant
to accept the idea that the painter should not seek to reproduce
realistically what he saw, although during 1890 he made his first
bold experiments in Synthetist painting.
Vuillard painted these experimental works,
usually based on a subject from his immediate environment, on
small pieces of board. The earliest were painted in bright, often
arbitrary colours with the subject reduced to its essential components;
tones and hues were combined and balanced to produce a dense pattern-like
surface. By 1892 he was using a more muted palette and had turned
to family themes. La Causette (Edinburgh, N.G. Mod. A.; see fig.
1), which depicts his mother and sister seated in an interior,
is typical of this phase: painted predominantly in browns, it
conveys the strong aura of mystery characteristic of much of Vuillard’s
early work.
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Portrait of Lugné-Poë, 1891
Memorial Art Gallery of
the University of Rochester |
Like other Nabi artists, especially Denis and
Bonnard, Vuillard was influenced by the simplification and emphasis
on expressive contour of 19th-century Japanese woodcuts. The theatre
was an important stimulus on his choice of subjects and his predilection
for muted and mysterious light effects. He was courted early on
by such theatrical patrons as the actor Coquelin Cadet and by
the theatre director André Antoine. His closest friend
in the theatre was, however, the young actor–manager Aurélien
Lugné-Poe who was largely responsible, through Paul Fort’s
Théâtre d’Art and later through his own company
L’Oeuvre, for introducing Symbolist drama to Paris. Vuillard
not only attended many of the latter’s rehearsals and performances
of plays by Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Strindberg and others but often
painted scenery and designed costumes and programmes. Vuillard
was a founder-member of Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre
de l’Oeuvre, which opened in 1893.
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La Cuisinière from the portfolio
Paysages et Intérieurs, 1899.
Lithograph, printed in color
useum of Modern Art, New York |
With other members of the Nabi group, Vuillard
had exhibited small-scale works at the Le Barc de Boutteville
gallery. Later in the 1890s he showed work at Ambroise Vollard’s;
in 1897 the latter commissioned him to produce a series of colour
lithographs on the theme Landscape and Interiors (1899; New York,
MOMA).
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Woman in a Striped Dress, 1895
National gallery of Art, Washington
(the model is Misia Natanson) |
An important factor in Vuillard’s development
as a painter in the 1890s was his association with the Revue Blanche
and his friendship with its editors, the Natanson brothers. The
editor-in-chief and art critic was Thadée Natanson, and
he and his wife, Misia (a frequent model during these years),
became close friends of Vuillard.
In 1892 Vuillard received a commission to paint
panels (Paris, Desmarais priv. col.) for Paul Desmarais, a cousin
of the Natansons; this was followed by a major decorative commission
in 1894 from the wealthiest of the Natanson brothers, Alexandre,
to paint nine panels for the dining-room of a grand mansion on
the Avenue du Bois. Vuillard chose the theme of Public Gardens
and produced an amalgam and imaginative reconstruction of his
observations in the Tuileries or the Bois de Boulogne, for example
Little Girls Playing and The Interrogation (both Paris, Mus. d’Orsay;
see fig. 2), and the figures of nannies seated gossiping while
overseeing their charges. Although planned as a decorative ensemble,
the panels were later dispersed, and the eight that survive (one
was lost during World War II) are now housed in different museums
(five panels, Paris, Mus. d’Orsay; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.;
Houston, TX, Mus. F.A.; Brussels, Mus. A. Mod.).
| The Public Gardens, 1894 (distemper
on canvas) |
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The Conversation
Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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The Red Parasol
Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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The Nursemaids
Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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The Questioning
Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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Young Girls Playing
Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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The Two Schoolboys
Musées Royaux des
Beaux-Arts de
Belgique, Brussels |
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Under the Trees
Cleveland Museum of Art |
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First Steps
Tom James Company/
Oxxford Clothes |
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In 1896 Vuillard was commissioned by Dr Henri
Vaquez to paint four panels for a library, Figures and Interiors
(Paris, Petit Pal.), and further important decorative commissions
followed: two panels in 1898 for the novelist Jean Schopfer, Figures
in the Garden of Le Relais, Villeneuve-sur-Yonne (priv. col.,
see 1954 exh. cat., pp. 66–7), and two in 1899 for Adam Natanson,
Landscapes—Ile-de-France (Chicago, IL, A. Inst.; Pasadena,
CA, Norton Simon Mus.).
(ii) 1900–14
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Madam Hessel on the Sofa 1900-01
National Museums & Galleries
on Merseyside, England |
In the early years of the 20th century Vuillard
began to show work at the Parisian gallery of the Bernheim-Jeune
family and was later contracted to them. Lucy Hessel, wife of
Jos Hessel, a partner in the firm, became a close friend, confidante
and model, and Vuillard’s time was spent increasingly in
the Hessels’ entourage, which included successful actors
and playwrights as well as wealthy business people.
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Place Vintimille, 1911
Five-panel screen
National Gallery of Art,
Washington |
Under his new commercial arrangements, Vuillard
was encouraged to produce a wider range of work, landscapes and
portraits as well as the decorative panels and small interiors
typical of the 1890s. He found a new delight in landscape studies
at this period, most of which were inspired by the seaside holidays
in Normandy and Brittany that he spent with the Hessels. Work
was plentiful, and he was commissioned to paint more decorative
panels for private clients: between 1908 and 1910 he produced
a series of eight views of Streets of Paris (New York, Guggenheim;
priv. col.), acquired by the playwright Henry Bernstein, and between
1911 and 1913 an extensive decorative scheme for the vast seaside
villa of the Bernheim-Jeune family at Villers-sur-Mer.
In 1912 Vuillard received his first commission
for a public building, a series of decorations in Paris on theatrical
themes to ornament the foyer of the Comédie des Champs-Elysées,
a theatre within the new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
(inaugurated in 1913). The two principal panels represent Classical
Comedy (a scene from Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire)
and Modern Comedy (a scene from Tristan Bernard’s Le Petit
Café).
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Théodore Duret, 1912
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC |
Portraiture became an increasingly dominant
aspect of Vuillard’s work, and he found no shortage of sitters;
many were fashionable members of the beau monde, others were intimate
friends and professional associates. One of his most striking
portraits of these years, Théodore Duret in his Study (1912;
Washington, DC, N.G.A.), typifies Vuillard’s broad strategy,
probably influenced by the theories of the late 19th-century Realist
critic Edmond Duranty. He effectively amalgamated the role of
portrait painter with that of painter of interiors, portraying
his models in domestic settings characteristic of them and often,
in the process, extending the psychological penetration of the
portrait. In the case of Duret, the writer is shown in his study,
surrounded by the books and papers that are the tools of his profession
and by other paintings and portraits acquired over the years.
Whereas during his Nabi phase Vuillard had simplified and pared
down his vision to a flattened pattern and had frequently attracted
criticism for imprecision, from c. 1900 he treated space in a
more three-dimensional way. Typically he set his model well back
into the picture space and in some instances lavished almost as
much attention on the familiar objects and minutiae that make
up the interior setting as on the distinguishing features of his
sitter.
(iii) 1915–40
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Interrogatoire d'un prisonnier, 1917
Musée d'Histoire Contemporaine, Paris |
Vuillard’s established patterns of work
were little affected by World War I. In 1914 he was called up
to serve briefly as a railway look-out near Paris. He later served
as a war artist, sketching soldiers on the front line at Gérardmer
and producing a large painting recording the Interrogation of
the Prisoner (1917; Paris, Mus. Hist. Contemp.). In 1916 he was
commissioned by Thadée Natanson, director of the Lazare-Lévy
munitions factory in Lyon, to record in two panels (Troyes, Mus.
A. Mod.), as part of a decorative scheme, the assembly-line work
at the factory. When hostilities ceased, Vuillard concentrated
mainly on portraiture, still undertaking decorative commissions
occasionally. The last of his major schemes for a private client
was the series At the Louvre (1921–2; priv. col., see Thomson,
pls 125-7), four panels and two overdoors inspired by different
aspects of the Louvre’s collections. These were destined
for the house of a Swiss friend whom Vuillard had met during the
war. It is the only example of the artist’s private decorative
schemes to remain intact, although not in situ.
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The Park of the
Château des Clayes, 1934
Private collection |
Between 1923 and 1937 Vuillard painted four
important portraits of his closest artist friends, all former
members of the Nabi group: Roussel, Denis, Bonnard and Maillol,
each of whom is shown at work in characteristic manner. The four
portraits were shown at the Exposition Internationale of 1937
and bought with full-scale studies by the City of Paris (Paris,
Petit Pal.). In the same year Vuillard painted a decorative panel,
again on the theme of Comedy, for the inauguration of the Théâtre
de Chaillot in Paris. The panel depicts characters from Shakespeare
and Molière, in a bucolic setting inspired by the park
of the Château des Clayes, the Hessels’ country home
near Versailles. A final major project was an enormous mural (in
situ) for the new League of Nations building in Geneva, the Palais
des Nations, an ambitious and courageous undertaking but, given
the traditional allegorical theme, scarcely one that Vuillard
was ideally equipped to execute. He sought inspiration in the
art of the past, particularly that of Eustache Le Sueur, an artist
he had long admired.
Vuillard was elected to the Institut de France
in 1937, a mark of his country’s esteem, and in 1938 a major
retrospective, selected by the artist’s friend Claude Roger-Marx,
was held at the Pavillon de Marsan in Paris. Ill and severely
distressed by the fall of France, Vuillard fled occupied Paris.
Top page
2. Working methods and technique
At the outset of his career Vuillard worked in
conventional media, usually oil on canvas, exploiting the luminous
qualities of oil paint in a series of tonal still-lifes. In experimenting
with the ideas of his Nabi friends, however, and in emphasizing
the flat decorative qualities of his painting, he began to use
cardboard, a more solid absorbent base, and cultivated a matt
surface, using very dry oil paint and often allowing the light
buff or grey colour of the ground to play a vital part in the
establishment of relationships of colour and tone. Many of his
early Nabi studies were subsequently varnished by others, a practice
Vuillard avoided, thereby losing much of their intended muted
texture. Around 1890 his drawing style underwent a similar reductive
process to his painting, and for a time he deployed simple shapes
and strong silhouette-like or cloisonnist outlines.
In a number of his paintings of the mid-1890s,
Vuillard’s interest in the patterns and textures of fabrics,
wallpapers and carpets and his avoidance of indications of depth
produced a dense overall effect and spatial ambiguity. Good examples
of such an effect are Large Interior with Six Figures (1897; Zurich,
Ksthaus) and Misia and Vallotton in the Dining-room, Rue Saint
Florentin (New York, William Kelly Simpson priv. col., see fig.
3). After the turn of the century, however, possibly as a result
of his working increasingly from photographs, he returned to a
more conventional use of perspective and lightened his palette,
concentrating in an almost impressionistic manner on luminosity.
His later drawing style became more nervously linear, and when
working on a portrait, for example, he patiently built up a dossier
of sketches recording fragments and details that were incorporated
into the whole at the final stage.
Vuillard is recognized as an artist of great
technical expertise. For most of his career, in preference to
oil, he used the difficult medium of distemper or peinture à
la colle, a water-based medium mixed with glue that dried quickly
and left a matt, opaque surface. He had first used distemper in
scenery painting in the early 1890s and found its properties suitable
for his large decorative panels. After c. 1900 most of Vuillard’s
painting in all genres was done in this medium. Because of distemper’s
rapid drying time, he was able to build up layer upon layer of
paint, so that certain areas of his canvases are thickly encrusted
while others are less worked. Over time the distemper has generally
hardened. In cases where Vuillard had left insufficient time for
the drying process, mixed up a faulty balance of glue and pigment
or, as frequently happened with his decorative panels, reworked
a canvas after an interval, his paintings have suffered damage
from cracking and flaking and pose problems of conservation. For
drawing Vuillard particularly favoured pastel after 1900 and again
he made full use of the subtle delicacy of this difficult medium.
Top page
3. Character and personality
Vuillard was a likeable man who inspired affection
in those close to him. He was of a reserved and quiet rather than
extrovert personality, though capable of expressing pent-up emotion
in sudden violent outbursts. He was suspicious of some of the
more flamboyant of his contemporaries, such as Gauguin, preferring
to associate himself with the achievements of such artists as
Monet, Degas or Puvis de Chavannes. He weighed his words carefully
and thought deeply about his art, as can be seen from his exchange
of letters with his theoretically minded friend Maurice Denis
in 1898, published in Denis’s Journal. Beset by moral scruples,
he frequently agonized over his personal conduct, as is revealed
in his journal. Although Vuillard was a bachelor and lived with
his mother until her death in 1928, he was very much a part of
the Roussel family, lovingly watching and recording the development
of their children. He also evidently enjoyed the company of women
and had several close female friends; Lucy Hessel, his ‘dragon’
as his mother referred to her, played a particularly influential
role in his life. Women and children were the main inspirations
for his figure paintings; indeed Vuillard was somewhat puzzled
to note this personal predilection in his diary of 1894, quizzing
himself on why he tended to envisage men only as sources for comic
images while seeing women as sources of beauty.
Despite the successes later in his career, he
continued to live modestly; from 1908 he occupied a succession
of apartments overlooking Place Vintimille (now Place Adolphe-Max),
a quiet residential square near the Montmartre cemetery. Vuillard’s
interiors, approached from a realist perspective, are a faithful
and telling record both of his own private circumstances and of
the changing styles of living in the period during which he worked.
Some critics feel that his art was detrimentally affected by his
introduction through the Hessels and their grand bourgeois friends
to a world of ease, prosperity and sometimes vulgar ostentation;
they argue that the essence of his work lay in its sensitivity
to the scrubbed, frugal interiors of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie,
settings associated with the artist’s mother. In his diary
of 1893, Vuillard asked himself the question: ‘Why is it
in the familiar places that the mind and the sensibility find
the greatest degree of genuine novelty?’ In his later portrait
work Vuillard was notorious for changing and omitting nothing,
recording the most trivial of details and the most garish of colour
combinations. While occasionally the paintings may seem overelaborated
and uninspired as a result, he was also capable of approaching
an irksome commission with an ironic or at least mischievous eye
by which he achieved a telling picture.
Top page
4. Critical reception and posthumous
reputation
Although when first exhibited at Le Barc de Boutteville’s
gallery the works of the Nabi group as a whole were considered
outrageous, daub-like and incomprehensible by many critics, Vuillard
tended to escape the worst attacks and was quickly singled out
for praise by such critics as Roger Marx, Thadée Natanson
and Léon-Paul Fargue. In the climate of Symbolism, Vuillard’s
ability to infuse a mundane subject with an atmosphere of mystery
had a special appeal. He was much admired for his abundant natural
talents by such contemporary artists as Denis, Signac and Sickert.
Vuillard, however, also found a sympathetic audience among writers:
he was admired by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, and
his large-scale decorations, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne
of 1905, were highly praised by André Gide. Seen against
the gathering momentum of developments in 20th-century art for
which he felt little sympathy (Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism),
Vuillard’s style seemed to settle as a kind of latter-day
Impressionism, and he became accepted as an independent member
of the establishment. By the 1920s he could be accused of conservatism
by the more avant-garde critics of the day, such as André
Lhote, who chided him for the superficiality of attending to modish
material details in his portraits and interiors. By the time of
his 1938 retrospective, the critic Claude Roger-Marx (the exhibition
selector) was of the opinion that Vuillard’s early works,
before he was inundated with commissions for demanding clients,
had been his greatest achievements. This preference for the early
experimental work, a syndrome of modernist criticism, affects
the work of many artists who, like Vuillard, made the transition
from the avant-garde to the establishment.
Given his particular sensitivity to the study
of everyday life, of domestic interiors and their inhabitants,
Vuillard has frequently been categorized as an intimiste, belonging
to the realist domestic tradition in painting that had its roots
in the Netherlands in the 17th century and that was carried forward
in France by such artists as Watteau, Chardin and Corot. Since
Vuillard’s death, his qualities as a colourist and an experimenter
in tone have continued to be celebrated. The mysterious magic
of his early interiors continues to hold the widest appeal, while
his considerable achievements in the sphere of decorative painting
are beginning to be more fully appreciated.
Top page
Unpublished Sources
Journal, 48 vols, Paris, Institut de France
Bibliography
Monographs
- J. Salomon: Vuillard, témoignage (Paris, 1945)
- A. Chastel: Vuillard, 1868-1940 (Paris, 1946)
- C. Roger-Marx: Vuillard: His Life and Work (London, 1946)
- --: L'Oeuvre gravé de Vuillard (Paris, 1948)
- J. Salomon: Auprès de Vuillard (Paris, 1953)
- --: Vuillard admiré (Lausanne, 1961) S. Preston: Vuillard
(New York, 1971/ R London, 1985) [good pls]
- L. Oakley: Edouard Vuillard (New York, 1981)
- B. Thomson: Vuillard (Oxford, 1988) [good pls; contains
new inf. about the artist's life and work based on extracts
from the artist's j.]
- G. Gloom: E. Vuillard: Painter-Decorator: Patrons and Projects,
1892-1912 (London, 1993)
Specialist studies
- A. Chastel: 'Vuillard et Mallarmé', La Nef (26 Jan 1947),
pp. 13-25
- J. Salomon and A. Vaillant: 'Vuillard et son Kodak', L'Oeil,
100 (1963), pp. 14-25, 61
- R. Bacou: 'Décors d'appartements au temps des Nabis', A.
France, iv (1964), pp. 190-205
- J. Dugdale: 'Vuillard the Decorator', Apollo, lxxxi/36 (1965),
pp. 94-101; lxxxvi/68 (1967), pp. 272-7
- M. Kozloff: 'Four Short Essays on Vuillard', Artforum, x/4
(1971), pp. 64-71
- G. Mauner: 'Vuillard's Mother and Sister Paintings and the
Symbolist Theatre', Artscanada, xxviii/162-3 (1971-2), pp.
124-6
- C. Frèches-Thory: 'Jardins publics de Vuillard', Rev. Louvre,
4 (1979), pp. 305-12
- J. Wilson Bareau: 'Edouard Vuillard et les princes Bibesco',
Rev. A. [Paris] (1986), pp. 37-46
Exhibition catalogues
- Exposition E. Vuillard (exh. cat., ed. C. Roger-Marx; Paris,
Mus. A. Déc., 1938)
- Edouard Vuillard (exh. cat., ed. A. Carnduff-Ritchie; New
York, MOMA, 1954/R 1969)
- Bonnard, Vuillard et les Nabis (1888-1903) (exh. cat., Paris,
Mus. N. A. Mod., 1955)
- Edouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel (exh. cat., ed. P.
Georgel; Paris, Mus. Orangerie, 1968) [good illus.]
- Vuillard (exh. cat., ed. J. Russell; Toronto, A.G. Ont.;
San Francisco, CA Pal. Legion of Honor; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.;
1971; rev. with intro. by J. Russell and extracts from important
sel. texts by Vuillard's contemps, London, 1971)
- Vuillard Interiors (exh. cat., ed. G. Shackelford and E.
Easton; Houston, TX, Mus. F.A.; Washington, DC, Phillips Col.;
1989)
- Vuillard (exh. cat., ed. B. Thomson; London, S. Bank Cent.,
1991)
BELINDA THOMSON
© Belinda Thomson: 'Vuillard, Edouard',
The Grove Dictionary of Art Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed 27 March
2003) <http://www.groveart.com>
