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VUILLARD

From Post-Impressionist
to Modern Master

VUILLARD

From Post-Impressionist
to Modern Master

Main Galleries
31 January 18 April 2004
An Introduction to the Exhibition
for Teachers and Students
Written by Greg Harris
for the Education Department
Royal Academy of Arts, 2004

On the cover:
Cat. 126 The Striped Blouse 1895 (detail)
Oil on canvas, 65.7 58.7 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon, 1983.1.38

Designed by Isambard Thomas

Printed by Burlington

INTRODUCTION
We perceive nature through our senses, which give us images of forms
and colours, sound etc. A form, a colour exists only in relation to another.
Form alone does not exist. We are only aware of the relationships .
From Vuillards journal, November 1888

The Impressionists
study colour
exclusively as a
decorative effect, but

This exhibition of the work of Edouard Vuillard () gives London

its rst opportunity to see a comprehensive survey of this artists work. Often
linked with the better-known painter Pierre Bonnard (), whose career
paralleled his in many ways, Vuillard is mainly known for his early intimate,
domestic interiors, featuring his family and friends. Painted in a dense, textured
manner, the space is often attened, with gures disappearing into the pattern
of the surface. Vuillard also painted large-scale decorations for domestic settings
at the same time as designing sets for the avant-garde theatre of the s.
After about his painting style became more realistic, and he adopted more
naturalistic solutions to space and light, as he expanded the subject-matter
of his work to include landscapes, city views, still-lifes and a large number
of society portraits. From the late s, he obsessively recorded his family
and friends with his little Kodak Brownie camera.
Vuillard began his career as an artist at a time when many painters in
France were exploring new and radical approaches to their art in reaction
to the perceived realism of the Impressionists. Artists such as Georges Seurat
(), Paul Gauguin (), Vincent van Gogh (),
Paul Czanne (), Odilon Redon () and others were
searching for new ways of structuring their paintings, and in some cases,
of redening the very purposes of painting itself. It was an exciting and
competitive time to be an artist, and for the rst ten years of his career
Vuillard was at the forefront of the avant-garde.

without freedom,
retaining the shackles
of verisimilitude

BECOMING AN ARTIST

They heed only the

Vuillard was the youngest of three children. After his fathers retirement
from the army in , the family moved to Paris. Vuillards mother, who
was to be the dominating inuence in his life, started a business as a corsetand dressmaker. Six years later, in , Vuillards father died.
Edouard attended the prestigious Parisian school, the Lyce Condorcet,
where he made a number of friendships that would last throughout his life.
At rst he was uncertain about his career and might even have followed his
father into the army, as his elder brother was to do. But on leaving school
in , with the encouragement of his school friend, Kerr-Xavier Roussel
() and the strong support of his mother, he started studying at
various art studios. It was only on his fourth attempt that he gained
admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in July , and it seems that he
was quite proud to be a pupil of the conventional, established painters who
taught there.
As a young man, Vuillard was shy and dident, uncomfortable with his
appearance. He kept a journal from until his death in (although the
years from to are missing), in which he recorded aspects of his life
in words and pictures. Philosophical musings, notes on art and his changing

eye and neglect the

mysterious centres of
thought, thereby
falling into merely
scientific reasoning.
Gauguin

views about it are mixed with sketches of paintings from the Louvre, quick
drawings of his family and friends, and notes and sketches of what he saw and
heard while walking round Paris.
While still a student, at the Louvre he was interested in the German School:
Hans Holbein (/), Albrecht Drer () and Lucas Cranach
(); in seventeenth-century Dutch painting: Rembrandt (),
Jan Vermeer () and Gerard Ter Borch (); and in eighteenthcentury French painting: Jean-Antoine Watteau (), Jean-Honor
Fragonard () and, above all, the still-life painter Jean-Baptiste-Simon
Chardin ().

THE NABI
It should be
remembered that
a picture, before being
a warhorse, a nude or
any other anecdote,
is first and foremost
a flat surface covered
with colours arranged
in a certain order.
Maurice Denis,
August 1890

Natural objects
are the signs of ideas,
and the visible is the
manifestation of the
invisible.
Maurice Denis

Vuillards initial artistic impulse was towards a naturalistic observation of his

world (only the mural painter Pierre-Ccile Puvis de Chavannes ()
is likely to have disturbed this realist approach). However, other forces were
also at work: towards the end of Vuillards school friend Maurice Denis
() urged him to join the Nabi group (the word is Hebrew for prophet).
Formed in the autumn of , the groups principal impetus came from Paul
Srusier (), who, having worked with Gauguin in Brittany, had
returned with a landscape painted under Gauguins instructions. His friends
Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Paul Ranson (), named the
painting The Talisman. What they learnt from this painting was the use of
simplied forms and at, exaggerated colour, and the avoidance of illusionistic
space. Although painted in front of nature, the paintings lesson was that in
future the artist should rely on memory, simplication and imagination in the
construction of his paintings; in order to communicate ideas and profound
emotions, he should cease to copy and begin to create. This approach to
painting had been labelled synthetism by Gauguins circle. As Denis later
wrote: thus we realised that every work of art was a transposition, a caricature,
the impassioned equivalent of a sensation experienced. It was heady stu and
perhaps we need to remind ourselves here that, when Vuillard joined the Nabi
in , he was , Denis was , Bonnard was and Srusier was .
Regular meetings took place in Paul Ransons studio. Apart from ideas
about painting, the Nabis discussed the German composer Richard Wagner
() and his conception of the total artwork as a synthesis of words,
music, stage-design and acting. They were also interested in the poetry of
Stphane Mallarm (), who believed in an ideal beauty realised
through an art of suggestion rather than of description. Some of the group
became involved with the many religious and philosophical ideas that
contributed to the movement known as Symbolism. In the desire to
communicate underlying meaning, Symbolist painters would use form,
colour and shape to represent emotional, religious or spiritual ideas.
Vuillard was later to admit that he had a horror of artistic theories that he
had not arrived at for himself. It is also likely that he would have ignored the
more esoteric religious ideas of some of his companions. Nevertheless, the
support of such a group of artistic friends would give Vuillard the freedom to
experiment, to be more forthcoming in discussion and to exchange and develop
ideas. Sometimes, however, you feel he needs to remind himself of the new

approach when he notes in his journal, for example, A womans head has
just produced in me a certain emotion. I must make use of this emotion alone
and I must not try to remember the nose or the ear, they are of no importance.
This painting of his mother and sister Marie at work exemplies
Vuillards adoption of the Nabi preoccupation with non-illusionistic space,
simplied forms and at, exaggerated colour. The viewer looks down on
Mme Vuillard as she cuts the large swathe of red cloth revealing the bright
yellow of the worktable. The painting relies on uidity of line and the use of
silhouette to create a series of interlocking forms that unify the graceful
arabesques into a harmonious whole. Maries face is treated with extreme
simplicity, no ear or nose particularised, yet the red blush on her cheek, the
circles round the eyes and the slight downturn of her mouth suggest an
emotional response to some possible criticism.

Cat. 12

Vuillard hides his mothers right arm underneath the red cloth as she cuts
it. What eect would it have had on the painting if he had shown it?
What function do you think the black cotton reel plays in the composition
of the painting?
What else might the whole process of cutting, reworking and
sewing the brightly coloured cloth suggest?

Cat. 12
The Dressmakers 1890
Oil on canvas, 47.5 57.5 cm
Private collection

The set should be an

THE THEATRE

entirely fictional

The dramatic poet is obliged to bring down into real life, into everyday life,

decoration that

the idea that he has of the unknown.

completes the illusion

The playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, 1901

through analogies
with the drama of
colour and line.
The playwright Pierre
Quillard

Though in the twentieth century it became commonplace for artists to

be involved in stage design Pablo Picasso (), Fernand Lger
(), Marc Chagall () and, in our own day, David
Hockney (), all designed sets for the ballet, opera or theatre the Nabis
were the rst painters not to feel a loss of status through their involvement
with the theatre. It was Vuillards school friend, the actor and director
Aurlien Lugn-Poe, who encouraged him to work on set designs for the
radical anti-naturalistic Thtre de lOeuvre, which he had founded, based
on the work of Symbolist playwrights like the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck
() and the Norwegian Henrick Ibsen (). Dramas like
these concentrated on the psychological condition of deeply alienated
characters. In Lugn-Poes productions of Maeterlincks plays the actors
movements were slowed and stylised, the words delivered as though they were
in a hypnotic trance. Sets were suggestive rather than descriptive, sometimes
making use of a gauze sheet in front of the stage through which the actors were
glimpsed moving across pools of articial light. All of the Nabis became
involved in set design and took the opportunity to try out the ideas that they
were developing in painting.
Lugn-Poe also applied his extreme interpretation of Symbolist drama to the
more naturalistic plays of Ibsen, much to that playwrights annoyance. Working
with Ibsens tense, emotional interior dramas Vuillard was able to conjure up
the claustrophobic atmosphere that would also be present in many of his easel
paintings. For the set of The Masterbuilder, he designed a sloping stage that
seemed to reinforce the instability and unreal aspirations of the characters.
Working in the theatre was to have a profound inuence on Vuillards painting
(and vice versa), most obviously in the dramatic lighting eects that characterise
some of his interiors, but also in the sense of an uncomfortable drama being
played out between the gures. It also enabled him to work on a larger scale
and to discover new techniques.
Distemper was the standard medium for scenery painting. This consisted
of powdered pigment mixed with heated glue, or size, which could be used
rapidly and economically over large areas and, being quick to dry, allowed for
changes or adjustments. Throughout his life, Vuillard was to use distemper
regularly in his own paintings, initially in large-scale decorations and then
more widely after .
Vuillard was involved with the theatre for much of the s, and although
nothing remains of his sets, apart from descriptions in memoirs and newspaper
reviews, his numerous programme designs do survive. With their dramatic use
of light and dark, swirling lines and enigmatic gures, the graphic style of these
designs is markedly dierent from that of his painting (cats and ).

THE INTERIORS

In fact there is no

Why is it in familiar places that ones spirit and sensibility find the most

perception that is not

that is really novel? Novelty is always necessary to life, to consciousness.

impregnated with

From Vuillards journal, August 1893

memory. To the
immediate and present

In his paintings of interiors of the s, Vuillard presented the enclosed world

of family and friends not in their immediate reality, but in an allusive, veiled
and indirect manner. He was not to remain faithful to the strict application of
Gauguins theories as propounded by the Nabi. While stressing the importance
of relationships in painting, he also believed that in order to appreciate these
relationships one should not focus on any point or colour longer than on any
other. He had used aspects of Seurats pointillism to blur and texture his
gures but now he developed a more complex all-over feeling to his paintings,
in search of a sense of evocation and suggestion.
Vuillard made endless sketches of his mother and sister and their assistants
working, of his family at the dinner table and of his friends at leisure. His
paintings, however, are not done from life, but are infused with memory and
imagination. Rooms express a feeling, a sensation of what might have been felt
rather than the realistic appearance of an interior. As we have seen, in much of
his work he attens space and plays with pattern, colour and tone to such an
extent that gures blend into a background and space whose structure we can
barely work out.
Looking at his many paintings of seamstresses, we see Vuillard living in a
feminine environment of fabric, lace and pattern, creating a sense of silent
absorption that was a celebration of his mothers work and possibly also an
analogy of his own life as a painter. However, while Vuillards surroundings
may have seemed to send him into a contemplative reverie, it is clear that he
also imposed his own interests on them. In some of the mother and daughter
paintings we seem to see emotions straight out of an Ibsen drama: Mme
Vuillard is presented as a black-clothed matriarch, perhaps somewhat severe
and even condemning, while Marie, awkward and uncertain, shrinks away
from her dominating presence. We do not know if there were diculties in the
relationship, but it is possible that Maries prolonged spinsterhood caused some
problems between mother and daughter. If this is so, it might explain Vuillards
encouragement of the marriage of his school friend and fellow Nabi KerrXavier Roussel to Marie, in July . Roussel was a handsome womaniser and
Marie was seven years older than him. The relationship went through dicult
periods; through the detective work of the art historian Guy Cogeval, we now
know that this relationship provided Vuillard with many subjects for his
painting.

data we receive with

our senses we add
thousands upon
thousands of details
from our past
experience.
The French philosopher
Henri Bergson, 1896

In this densely textured painting, Vuillard shows his sister Marie

standing by the work table, adjusting a length of pale blue cloth while an
assistant bends towards an open window. From behind a camouaged door
Kerr-Xavier enters the room to greet his ance. It is an optimistic and playful
image. Here Vuillard uses light as part of the patterning of the composition
rather than to create a naturalistic sense of space. The window is open,
although the profusion of blossom melds the exterior with the interior pattern
of the wallpaper. Light falls on the assistants arms and shoulders, picking up

Cat. 89

Cat. 89
Interior with
Worktable, also known
as The Suitor, 1893
Oil on board, 31.7 36.4 cm
Smith College Museum of Art,
Northampton, Massachusetts.
Purchased with the Drayton
Hillyer Fund

the blue of the cloth, and reecting it onto Marie and Kerr-Xaviers faces.
The shadow on Maries neck contrasts with the light ickering over her hair,
creating patterns that echo the wallpaper. A contemporary critic said that
Vuillards paintings reminded him of the woolly reverse side of a tapestry.
This painting uses oil paint on cardboard: Vuillard would frequently use
cardboard, because it was a cheaper material than prepared canvas and
because he liked its warm brown colour.
How has he used the cardboard to help unify the painting?
Although there is a very large amount of pattern in this painting, a sense
of harmony is achieved by the use of a very limited palette.
What part does the orange cupboard play in the structure and feeling
of the painting?
The spatial treatment of the table, chair and cloth in the bottom right-hand
corner seems ambiguous.
What part does this ambiguity play in the painting?
Vuillards paintings are often quite small.
How does looking close-up at small paintings contribute to the eects he
might be seeking?

Vuillards optimism was not to bear fruit. Marie gave birth to a stillborn child
in December and Roussel continued the aair he had been having with
the sister-in-law of the Nabi painter Paul Ranson. As Marie and Roussels
problems deepened, Roussel moved out of the Vuillards apartment to live with
his mother. The famous Large Interior with Six Figures (cat. ) has now been
shown by Cogeval to represent a visit by Mme Vuillard to the Ransons
apartment, during which the guilty parties were encouraged to end their
relationship.
Cat. 96 In this painting, we see Vuillards interest in the theatre coming to
the fore. The dining room, familiar from earlier paintings, is here transformed
into a dark stage set, in which a tense drama has just been played out. Bare,
black windows help to create a sense of claustrophobia. Kerr-Xavier is a
silhouette at the front of the picture plane; behind him stands Marie, her face
hidden, hands on the table, under a dark, unlit lamp hanging from the ceiling.
The shadow of this lamp, falling gloomily over the ceiling and left-hand corner
of the room, like the inverse of light, is cast by the sole source of illumination,
a table lamp on the right-hand side of the room. Over here we see Mme
Vuillard hovering in the wings, as though uncertain whether or not to make
an entrance. The lamplight reveals a display of bright discordant colours,
a small still-life expressive of the emotional temperature. A mutual friend,
who may have been trying to reconcile the couple, balances the composition
on the left of the painting.

Cat. 96
A Family Evening 1895
Oil on canvas, 48 65 cm
Private collection

Who speaks of art

speaks of Poetry.
There is no art without
a poetic aim. There is
a species of emotion
particular to painting.
There is an effect that
results from a certain
arrangement of
colours, of lights, of

How does the placing of Kerr-Xavier help to create a sense of space

and distance?
The brightly lit right-hand side of the room is made up of sharp-edged
rectangles and corners.
How does this contrast with the rest of the room and what atmosphere
does the contrast create?
What colour combination has Vuillard possibly used to remind himself
of happier times?

shadows etc. It is this

one calls the music of
painting.

THE NATANSONS

From Vuillards journal,

Thade Natanson, co-editor of the inuential La Revue Blanche, was one of three
wealthy brothers. He was attracted to the work of the Nabis, commissioning
illustrations and covers for his magazine from them. In he gave Vuillard
his rst one-man exhibition in the Revues oces. Two years later, Thade
married Misia Godebska, a Polish pianist and pupil of the composer Gabriel
Faur. Misia was attractive, intelligent and capricious. She gathered around
her a group of bohemian admirers and there is little doubt that Vuillard fell
under her spell. He helped her to decorate her apartment, went with her to
exhibitions and in the s painted her more than any other person outside
his family. Misia would introduce him to what Guy Cogeval calls an adult
sensuality.
From Vuillard started spending his vacations at the Natansons country
retreat, recording this leisured life both in his paintings and, from with his
newly acquired Kodak camera. Although there are intriguing connections
between some of the spatial distortions in Vuillards painting and the technical
limitations of these cameras, such as the wide-angled attening of space, the
limited range of focus and the dramatic enlargement of objects close to the
camera, Vuillard had already explored such eects before he took up
photography. He made use of his photographs as the basis for the compositions
of some of his paintings, but like his sketches, they were aids to his memory,
sensations recalled, such as the colour of a womans
dress (in spite of the fact that the photograph was in
black and white!).

January 1894

Cat. 179
Misia Natanson in the
Salon of Les Relais, in
Villeneuve sur Yonne
1899
Original gelatin silver print,
9 9 cm Private collection

N O T THIS PIC

The relationship between music and painting was a

central part of Symbolist thinking, linked to the
concept of synaesthesia, through which the senses
are related, in such a way that, for example, sounds
can provoke the minds eye into seeing colours or
images, and vice versa. Vuillard actively wished to
associate music and painting. When we look at his
densely textured, ambiguous works, we realise that,
in the same way that a series of notes exists in time
to make up the shape and harmony of a piece of
music, we need time to decode the patterns, to work
out the relationships and to feel the atmosphere

created by the many small brush strokes that make up Vuillards evocation of a
space, a presence, or a feeling.
Misia at the Piano is set in the large salon in the Natansons Parisian
apartment that Vuillard had already depicted in a more sharply focused way in
Interior, the Salon with Three Lamps, Rue Saint-Florentin (cat. ). In this painting of
the same room, we are aware of considerable distortion and ambiguity: Misia
seated at the piano seems too small and far away, her husband at the right too
large; the size of the white lamp on the piano, looming over the scene, suggests
that the end of the instrument is closer to us than it is. Behind the piano the
indecipherable tapestry, shot through with tiny dabs of paint, blends with the
objects on the piano to create an intensely rich colour-harmony. At the same
time there is a sense of disquiet. The shawl draped over the piano appears to
oat in space as though trying to connect Thade with the music on which he
has turned his back. Above his head a similar pattern of white and blue ascends
to the top corner, where Vuillard has placed his signature.
Cat. 157

What is the function in the painting of Misias comparatively plain yellow

dress?
Both lamps are on, but do you feel that Vuillard has lit the scene in a manner
that is consistent with that fact? If not, why?
Why does nothing in the painting seem solidly grounded?

Cat. 157
Misia at the Piano 1899
Oil on board, 55 80 cm
Private collection

The ground was

rough, I tripped on a
root and almost fell;
Vuillard stopped
abruptly to help me
regain my balance.
Our eyes met. In the
deepening shadows
I could see the sad
gleam of his glance.
He burst into sobs.
It was the most
beautiful declaration
of love ever made to
me. Misia Sert
(Natanson) (published
1953)

THE DECORATIONS

From the beginning, the Nabis, in keeping with their fellow Symbolists, had
been determined to expand the boundaries of art. They felt that easel painting
was too restrictive and that the artist should work in many dierent media and
environments. It was an idea that came readily from their work in the theatre,
from their admiration for the mural paintings of Puvis de Chavannes, and from
their love of medieval tapestries and Japanese screens.
Through his friendship with the Natansons, Vuillard would receive a number
of commissions to provide decorative panels for rooms in the houses of wealthy
patrons. These gave him the opportunity of varying his subject matter and of
enlarging onto a grander scale some of the themes of his intimate paintings.
All of Vuillards decorations were for specic rooms in his patrons houses, their
size and format being dictated by architectural considerations. Generally, he
was free to decide on the subject matter. Writing about these decorations for
Alexandre Natanson, he noted, Oer for a
decoration to do what I want. Why not attempt
it, why avoid these vague desires, why not have
condence in these dreams which are, which
will become reality for others as soon as I give
them precedence?
Cats 113 115 In this instance, he chose to depict
nurses and children in the public gardens of
Paris, a subject already addressed by other
Nabis such as Bonnard, who painted Nannies Out
for a Walk in the same year. The three panels
that we see here (part of a group of nine)
occupied one of the long walls of a rectangular
room. Vuillard is using distemper here for the
rst time in a large-scale composition outside of
the theatre. The matt surface, reminiscent of
fresco painting, allows him to achieve subtle
eects of tone and colour. In the composition,
the ground seems to tip upwards quite steeply,
occupying nearly half the space. Where the
sandy gravel meets the green fence and clumps
of vegetation it forms a kind of horizon. In the
left-hand panel, animated children and their
nurses form a cluster of overlapping gures,
while in the central panel, children are shown in
the far distance, behind the white umbrella of
one of the three women sitting talking; our eyes
dwell on the light and shade and the texture of
the ground in front of us. In the right-hand
panel, we nd a rather lonely grandmother
accompanied by her dog, but the tree above her
sparkles with light, which is reected at her feet.
Although we rightly admire Vuillard for his

sense of pattern and texture, a large part of the success of his work comes from
the extraordinarily expressive quality of his drawing. Often using silhouette, or
the most simple of lines, he catches the energy of the young boy in brown, the
character of the women in conversation, the tiredness of the lady in black a
result of the many hours spent sketching in the parks.

Cats 113 115

The Public Gardens:
The Nursemaids,
The Conversation,
The Red Parasol 1894,
reworked in 1936

Really, for apartment decoration a subject that is objectively too exact would
easily become intolerable. One becomes bored less quickly by a fabric, pictures
without too much literary precision. From Vuillards journal, August
How might Vuillard have created a sense of fabric in these panels?

Distemper on canvas
214.5 73 cm,
213 154 cm,
214 81 cm
Muse dOrsay, Paris

The wall must remain a surface, must not be breached by the representation
of innite horizons. There are no pictures only decorations. (Jan Verkade
[], an artist associated with the Nabis, ).
How has Vuillard avoided creating an illusion of a hole in the wall of the
room in which the decorations hung?

Cat. 126
The Striped Blouse
1895
Oil on canvas, 65.7 58.7 cm
National Gallery of Art,
Washington. Collection of Mr
and Mrs Paul Mellon, 1983.1.38

The Striped Blouse is one of the ve panels painted for Thade Natanson
that were known collectively as The Album. Sadly, only two of the ve have
been able to travel to London. Here Vuillard has taken his familiar theme of
the life and activity of women and treated it on a larger scale. He is probably
also inuenced by the Symbolist association of women and owers with purity
and innocence. In these ve panels, he reaches an apotheosis of sensuality, with
gure, ower, foliage, pattern and colour blending to create a remarkably rich
surface. Thade Natanson wrote of these paintings: Drawing, or the depiction
of objects, has no value in these paintings but the plastic value of arabesque.
The pleasure of naming objects is doubtless part of that given by the images,
but it is not the essential part, which is abstract. Thus although we see
a woman in a striped blouse, the sensation we experience is not that of a
clothed body but rather that of the liquid ow of lines and colour rippling
over the surface. The women are arranging owers and foliage but the mass
of leaves blocks our sense of space and form.

Cat. 126

Is there a unifying colour in the painting?

What part do the black and white owers play in the structure of the picture?
And the red?
How long did it take you to nd the third gure in the painting? How do you
account for the space she occupies?

TRANSITION AND CHANGE

At the turn of the century Vuillards work changed, both in style and in subject
matter. This shift may partly be explained by changes in his personal life.
Vuillards home environment had altered: his sister Marie and her husband had
moved out at the end of , and although they lost another child at the age of
two months in , the tensions in their marriage were partially resolved by
the birth of their daughter Annette in . Vuillard and his mother moved to
a smaller apartment shortly after Marie and Kerr-Xaviers departure and
is the last year in which his mothers name appears as a corsetire in the
commercial directory. The bustle and activity of work in the home had gone.
By the intensity of Vuillards friendship with Misia Natanson had
diminished; he now became friendly with Lucy Hessel, the wife of his new
dealer, Jos Hessel. She took him under her wing, and much to the annoyance
of Mme Vuillard, became a second mother gure and, probably, lover. It was
a friendship that was to last until his death. Her husband worked for the
Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which was to introduce Vuillard to new patrons
and encourage him to expand his subject matter. Under the Hessels inuence,
he began to move in wealthier social circles. Although Vuillards image is that
of a shy, retiring man, by this time he was in fact constantly dining out,
attending the theatre, ballet and cabarets or spending time with his friends.
Vuillards change in style was also largely due to his reassessment of
Symbolism and his revisiting of the art of the Impressionists, which led to
a growing interest in light and the way it can be used to create space and
volume. He began to use natural light sparingly in some of his interiors to
ameliorate the attened space and separate the gures from the background.
With an increasing interest in exterior subjects and landscape, light would be
used to create more realistic depictions. His activity as a photographer was
another contributing factor to this change. Photographs of family and
friends, set in a denable space, would lead him to paint his subjects more
as individuals than as gures. Later paintings of his mother would lose that
element of caricature and become more gently maternal. Early in his career
he had noted the dierence between photography and painting: the expressive
techniques of painting are capable of conveying an analogy but not an
impossible photograph of a moment. How dierent are the snapshot and the
Image! He went on to say that painting will always have the advantage over
photography because it is done by hand. Vuillards hand was changing.
Unlike Monet, Vuillard never painted landscapes unimbued with
personal association. Rather he painted places associated with friends or family,
where he would take leisurely vacations and fully absorb the atmosphere. In

Cat. 271

Cat. 271
Five-panel Screen
for Miss Marguerite
Chapin: Place
Vintimille 1911
Distemper on paper mounted
on canvas, 230 60 cm
(each panel)
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Gift of
Enid A. Haupt, 1998.47.1

Some strange
painting paraphernalia
[] filled a corner of
the room near the
window small
earthenware pots,
little brown vessels
used for cooking eggs,
grouped around a pan
in which brushes were
soaking; there were
paper bags full of
powdered pigment,
and, nearby, on a little
table, a spirit stove on

Paris, it was the views that were closest and most familiar to him that inspired
him. In , Vuillard and his mother had moved to a fourth-oor apartment
on the Rue de Calais overlooking Place Vintimille. He had already completed
two commissions for the wealthy American Marguerite Chapin, when he was
asked to produce this screen for her in May .
Vuillard incorporates elements from Japanese decorative screens, such as a
high-angled viewpoint, the cropping of action and shape at the edges and the
o-centred composition. Here he depicts a bright spring day, blending the
various greens of the emerging leaves and building towards the brightest young
leaves (or yellow blossom) that appear in the centre of the gardens. Shadows
cast by branches enliven the busy pavement. Vuillard used distemper for
the panels, a medium in which he had to work quickly, since the mixture of
pigment and size had to stay at blood temperature. Here we sense him revelling
in the animated brush strokes and frequently leaving the brown of his paper
support to dene his forms and unify the space.

which sat a bainmarie, a mustard pot

with its little wooden
spoon, in which the
glue was cooling.
Jacques Salomon,
Auprs de Vuillard, 1953

Do you think Vuillard could have seen the whole of this view from one position
or would he have had to turn his head to take it all in? Might he have used
photographs to help him?
How has he used the people and their black, blue or white clothes as accents
in the painting?
What function does the circular pavement with its circular tree-bases have
in the painting?

THE REALIST MASTER

The Nabis had never been a very stylistically unied group and by the turn
of the century they had gone their separate ways. The rush of avant-garde
movements in the rst decade of the century swept past them and Maurice
Denis was to write in , Under the pretext of synthesis, we have often made
do, let us admit it, with hasty generalisations. By becoming more simplied, our
art has become fragmentary and incomplete. We have produced many sketches
and very few paintings. Denis, along with Roussel, would engage in what he
called the search for a classical order, while Bonnard and Vuillard turned
increasingly to nature. Bonnard wrote, The pace of progress speeded up,
society was ready to accept Cubism and Surrealism before we had achieved
what we had set out to do. We were left, as it were, hanging in the air.
In the s the pressure to be non-naturalistic and constantly innovative
had been intense; to produce realistic images would have been unacceptable to
Vuillard and his fellow Nabis. Now, however, Vuillard would feel free to do so.
Gradually he would adopt a more traditional approach to a widening range of
subject matter: studio-based nudes, still-lifes and, above all, portraits. In doing
so he would engage more with the modern world, including its masculine
dimension, in portrayals of professionals at work. In documenting reality, rather
than evoking a subjective response to it, he would be able to make dierent
kinds of observations on Parisian life.

Cat. 289
Self-portrait in the
Dressing-Room Mirror
1923 24
Oil on board, 81 67 cm
Dian Woodner and Andrea
Woodner, New York

Shortly before painting this self-portrait, Vuillard nished a series of

decorative panels representing four galleries in the Louvre. On the one hand a
celebration of the art of the past and of French tradition, they were also a
meditation on the act of looking at and copying paintings. In this self-portrait,
we see Vuillard reected in a mirror in the act of washing his hands.
Surrounding the mirror are copies and reproductions of images that have
inspired him: a painting by the seventeenth-century artist Le Sueur, the goddess
Flora, a Poussin drawing, a Michelangelo head and a Japanese print. His
unseeing eyes stare out. With him in the mirror are examples of his own works,
so that the portrait becomes a reverie on past and present, a contemplation of
his feelings about that tradition.

Cat. 289

Might Vuillard be making a connection between himself and one of the

reproductions on the wall beside the mirror?
How does the way Vuillard has painted himself compare with other portraits
by him painted at this time, such as that in cat. ?
Do you think the way that Vuillard has painted this has the stamp of old
age on it?

Cat. 326
Jeanne Lanvin 1933
Distemper on canvas,
124.5 136.5 cm
Muse dOrsay, Paris.
Bequest of the Countess
Jean de Polignac, daughter
of the sitter, 1958

In the s Vuillard was one of the most sought-after portrait painters in

Paris. He was famous for saying I dont paint portraits, I paint people in
their homes.
Vuillard admired the critic Edmond Duranty who had written of the
Impressionists in , And since we stick closely to nature, we no longer
separate the gure from the background of the apartment or of the street.
The gure would never appear to us, in real life, against a neutral, empty,
vague background. But around and behind it there is furniture, [there are]
mantle pieces and wall hangings a backdrop that speaks of the subjects
wealth, class, profession.
Just as in his earlier interiors Vuillard had drawn furniture, owers,
wallpaper and other objects into an evocation of the relationships between the
gures he portrayed, so now in his portraits he would obsessively record the
details surrounding his subjects as a means of probing and illustrating their
personalities. As a consequence, the feel of the paintings ranges widely from
the comparative austerity of the businessman and collector Marcel Kapferer
(cat. ), to the almost baroque exuberance of Yvonne Printemps on the Sofa

(cat. ); from the restrained harmonies of pinks and reds bathed in the
yellow electric light that surrounds Mme Fernand Javal (cat. ), to the
portrait of the Countess Anna de Noailles (cat. ), now conned by illness
to her bedroom and painted by Vuillard in harsh, dissonant colours that seem
almost cruel in intent. She remarked: For heavens sake hide that tube of
Vaseline. M. Vuillard paints everything he sees.
The clothes designer Jeanne Lanvin was the creator of one of the rst
powerful Parisian fashion houses. Vuillards earlier portrait of her daughter, the
Countess de Polignac, had given him considerable problems. In December
, a month after he had started the portrait, his mother had died, and
Vuillard had been thrown into a crisis of grief and mourning. His nephew-inlaw Jacques Salomon believed that the long, drawn-out work on the Countesss
portrait became a kind of refuge and the distraction he was seeking from his
great sorrow. When Vuillard came to paint Jeanne Lanvins portrait he wrote:
eect of green in grey, tall mannequin, black, fabrics, street, quick decision;
women at work, childhood memories. It seems that this was a commission that
would allow him to reect on his mothers work.
Mme Lanvin is seated in her oce. A strong sense of calm and order is
conveyed by the verticals and horizontals of the cupboards, shelves and curtain
behind her, and by the horizontal desk at which she sits. It is the setting of a
successful businesswoman. Across the desk, starting at the bottom right-hand
corner and proceeding in a gentle diagonal are the signs of her creative life:
swatches of material, scraps of fabric, paper and sketches of designs. As usual,
Vuillard did many small studies of her hands, her face, the bookshelves and the
dog; on one sheet of his sketchbook he wrote a list to remind himself of
important details: pencils, telephone, handles, necklace, samples, hand.
From the details the picture draws its life. The cool, blue-grey colour of the
background is broken up with colour from the fabric samples and the bindings
of pattern books. Shiny metal handles on the cupboard doors indicate a
fashionable modernity. The sharpness of pencils suggests clarity of line. And on
the desk is a small bust of her daughter Marie-Blanche, so that the portrait is
not only an expression of Mme Lanvins creative achievement, but also of
maternal aection.

Cat. 326

Comparing this to Vuillards earlier paintings, how has he used the light
coming from the right-hand window?
Do you think Vuillard has manipulated reality or has he painted exactly what
he saw?
Looking closely at the head and its surrounding paintwork, do you think that
Vuillard has worked especially in this area, adjusting and correcting?

Edouard Vuillard died in , two years after a large retrospective exhibition

of his works in Paris. Claude Roger Marx, who produced one of the rst
books on Vuillard, wrote of the exhibition, A respectful semi-silence was
maintained by the critics: in general they seemed loth to discuss the work
of the last fteen years.
Why might this have been?

CONCLUSION

This exhibition reveals Vuillard as an artist who bridged the divide between
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the previous century, Vuillards
radicalism had allowed him to explore his most intimate feelings about his
world. In the twentieth century, while still documenting his life, a more realist
style enabled him to make observations of the Parisian world in a more
objective way.

Cats 12, 18 Photo Richard Valencia, ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003; cats 96, 271, 289 ADAGP,
Paris and DACS, London 2003; cats 113, 114, 115, 326 Photo RMN/Art Resource, NY/Herv Lewandowski,
ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003; cat. 126 Photo 2003 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of
Art, Washington, ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003