Edouard Vuillard

1868 - 1940 • French • Painter • Symbolist/Nabi

"Then the room of the saints! Vuillard who is triumphant there, expressing the joy and tenderness of things!" - Paul Signac, 1899

A contemporary, close friend, and studio mate of BONNARD, Vuillard was similarly concerned with intimate, everyday scenes. But whereas there is a relaxed, open sense to Bonnard, Vuillard's pictures seem confusing and tense. Interior decor-even the pattern of a dress, rug, or curtain-seems to absorb the human figures present. Such is the case with Vuillard's best-known painting, Workroom (1893). In it are his mother, a dressmaker, his sister, and his brother-in-law (also a painter and member of the NABIS). The black and yellow of his mother's dress, the tightly patterned wallpaper, large surfaces of fabrics-dark and light blues, and white-an orange cupboard with dashes of paint on top that may represent a cat, all seem submerged in a sea of dots, dashes, and daubs. It is as if Vuillard wished to paint the confinement of their lives with these patterns. He is not an IMPRESSIONIST, but his short, quick brushstrokes are impressionistic. It is composition and color that sets the mood in his paintings. Even in portraits, like one of the art critic DURET (1912), a supporter of the Impressionists, the interior setting, filled with paintings and folios, swarms about the subject of the painting. The background of Vuillard's painting includes a famous portrait of Duret as a dashing boulevardier painted by WHISTLER 30 years before Vuillard's portrait. Duret is not only a good deal older, but he is also seen by Vuillard with deeper sympathy and sensitivity. Surrounded by his books and papers, with a cat on his knee, he seems lonely and vulnerable, yet self-contained and pensive. It has been said that so great a portrait of an old man had not been painted since REMBRANDT lived some 300 years earlier. The painter SIGNAC, whose description of the artist is quoted above, was an ardent admirer of Vuillard.