Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940

In this early painting (the artist was twenty-one) Vuillard is seen with a friend in a room of his grandmother's Paris apartment. The figures are reflected in a mirror, visible only in the double image of the bottle at lower right. The artist's pose, the palette, and the raking light recall self-portraits of artists he admired: Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and, through them, Diego Velàzquez.

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Early on, the artist showed a profound interest in his own surroundings. The dressmaking workshop managed by his mother became the source for experiments in style and meaning. In this scene, the arrangement of contrasting light and shadow, patterns and solid forms, planes and space captures the world of feminine labor, interpreted with a delicacy and grace reminiscent of the Japanese printmakers whose work Vuillard was beginning to collect.

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Around 1897 Vuillard began to make his first photographs, using a Kodak Brownie box camera. Thadée Natanson's brother Alfred gave him lessons, and he usually printed his negatives at home, with the help of his mother.

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The house called La Grangette, in the country near Fontainebleau, was Misia and Thadée Natanson's first summer retreat away from Paris. The house became a gathering place for the young artists and writers of the Revue Blanche set. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé lived nearby. As Misia later recalled:

The house at Valvins rapidly became a branch of the review. But I had to make a selection and invited only those that my heart, above all, had chosen. Vuillard and Bonnard were installed once and for all and Toulouse-Lautrec came regularly from Saturday to Tuesday.

Marie-Sophie-Olga-Zenaïde Godebska, called Misia, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, the daughter of a celebrated Polish sculptor. She was a talented pianist; as a girl she had studied with Gabriel Fauré. Her glittering salon attracted most of the creative spirits of Paris—the poets Verlaine, Valéry, and Mallarmé (who gave her fans with poems on them); the writers Gide and Colette; the composers Debussy and Ravel; theater luminaries such as Caruso and Diaghilev. In later years her friends were to include Picasso, Laurencin, Cocteau, and the couturier Coco Chanel. This deft portrait, made when she was in her twenties, captures her youthful charm at a pensive moment.

On a summer visit to Le Relais, Coolus is reading in a room hung with images. On the door is an 1894 poster by Bonnard advertising La Revue Blanche. Next to it is a small Japanese woodblock print. The muse Misia, depicted in the poster, hovers over the scene.

In this signature Nabi work Vuillard embeds his figures in a compressed space packed with competing patterns and suppressed emotion. (A painting by him hangs on the back wall.) The three figures all look in different directions, slightly at odds. Misia gazes over a blue-and-white bowl, ignoring the pleas of her little dog. The expression and gesture of the painter Félix Vallotton, behind her, suggest interior reflection. Her husband, Thadée, is barely in the scene, invoked as a pipe and paunch along the left edge. With characteristic pictorial wit, Vuillard evokes the aestheticism and self-absorption of summers in the country with the Natansons.

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Half asleep, in a loose, rose-colored robe, Lucy reclines within a pergola by the sea. Whether nymph or Venus, she is a powerful evocation of erotic indolence.

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The gallerists Josse and Gaston Bernheim actively promoted the artist after 1900, including him in thirty-two group shows at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery and five solo exhibitions during his lifetime, the first in 1906 and the last in 1938. The brothers married sisters, Mathilde and Suzanne Adler. Vuillard painted the two couples in the salon of the grand Paris home they shared. From left to right are Josse, his wife, Mathilde, Suzanne, and her husband, Gaston. Vuillard uses a studied carelessness and rapid, bravura technique to evoke an impression of domestic splendor.

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The painting of his dealer's three-year-old son is one of Vuillard's most opulent and inventive portraits of a child. The boy in his fine clothes, seated on a tapestry-covered sofa, presents a life of privilege that seems to belong to a distant age. At left, at first scarcely visible, sits his mother, Suzanne. Claude perished in Auschwitz in 1943 — a reminder of how abruptly the world of prosperous French Jews came to an end.

Vuillard spent the summer of 1908 with the Hessels at Le Pouliguen, a port town in Brittany. On August 25 the artist noted in his journal that he was working on a large sketch with figures. Four friends huddle on a long stone promenade below a blue line of ocean, lit with the rays of the dying sun. The emphasis on sweeping, nearly abstract fields of color creates a striking panorama.

Lucy, in a deep blue velvet robe, is studying books and papers in her airy bedroom. The setting is probably the Hessels' country house in Normandy, where Vuillard was a frequent guest. The portrait reveals the closeness of his relationship with Lucy, showing her in a moment of reverie within her private domain. It is at once intimate and informal, painted in a softly atmospheric style and using one of Vuillard's favorite devices: the mirror at upper left that reflects an open window and the garden beyond.

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Within a densely decorated interior, pulsating with burgundy tones, two women arrange bouquets of chrysanthemums, while a third stands behind them. Woman in a Striped Dress was originally one of a set of five paintings, entitled The Album, owned by Misia and Thadée Natanson and now dispersed. The couple’s aesthetic interests (English Arts and Crafts and Japonisme) are reflected in the painting's style. The sensual evocation of scent and color, the merging of figures and ground, and the rich ambiguity of the whole make this a jewel of the Nabi period.

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Vuillard often created multipanel works, such as Place Vintimille, whose four panels originally were hung together; two are seen here. Repetition of a single motif, observed at different hours and in varying kinds of weather, is an approach made famous by Claude Monet. For the tall, narrow format and the acute observation of urban detail, Vuillard drew inspiration from the Japanese printmakers Hiroshige and Hokusai. As always, the artist’s outdoor scenes capture season and time of day with great sensitivity—bright winter sunlight in the first panel, effects of cold and damp here.

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This is one of a suite of portraits of the Kapferer family: likenesses of Marcel, his mother, and his wife were intended to hang in the room depicted here. Its opulent furnishings and Simone Kapferer’s silk dress suggest wealth and a highly cultivated leisure. Vuillard loved to include paintings within his paintings—sometimes his own, sometimes works of other artists owned by his sitters. At upper left is Odilon Redon's Ophelia.

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Marcel Kapferer was a close friend of Vuillard in the 1920s and one of his most ardent patrons. He is seated in the painter's studio, his private realm, surrounded by art in the making. Behind him stands Bonnard's famous lithographed screen; three of Vuillard's own works are pinned to the wall. Marcel is leafing through a portfolio, and is thus presented as a connoisseur, rather than a man of affairs. The setting and pose recall Degas's portrait of a print collector, while the formality of the posture and angle of the chair bring to mind Velázquez’s papal portraits. The sitter’s character is conveyed with extraordinary realism.

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This painting was commissioned by the sitter's sons, Henri and Marcel. Madame Kapferer's pose is regal, reminiscent of an El Greco cardinal, her expression austere. We feel we know what sort of person she is—her tastes, her cultural and economic class, her personality. From the curious angle of the viewpoint, the virtuoso treatment of her black dress, and the subtle disorder that reigns among the accumulated bibelots and photographs there emerges one of the artist's masterpieces of setting and characterization.

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Marcelle Aron, Lucy Hessel’s cousin and close friend, is receiving in the conservatory of her Paris apartment. Vuillard’s frequent use of a mirror to play tricks with space and perspective is here especially dramatic. The three-quarter view gives us a second Marcelle, glimpsed in profile, and a light-filled window apparently seen in a second mirror within the glass. The use of a heavily patterned background, thick encrustation of detail, and flattened perspective recalls Vuillard’s Nabi period. Now, however, every accessory is precisely identifiable: Madame Aron’s soignée dress (designed by the couturier Décrolle), the Pomeranian dog, the blue-and-gold Biedermeier sofa, the vases of guelder roses and tulips, and an issue of the drama magazine Comoedia, lying casually on a table.

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The banker David David-Weill was chairman of the family investment bank Lazard Frères and, after the Great War, one of France's greatest collectors. Vuillard portrays him as a connoisseur, holding a document, armed with a magnifying lens, and surrounded by splendid objets d'art and furnishings. Among the array of paintings are many eighteenth-century masterworks, including Portrait of Marie-Gabrielle Capet by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin's Soap Bubbles.

Born in a village in Poland, the art dealer Sam Salz studied art in Vienna and then opened a gallery, first in Cologne and later in Paris. He was an advocate of the modernist painters of the 1920s, including Arp, Braque, and Chagall. In 1938 he moved to the United States. He met Vuillard on a visit to Paris just before World War II and later represented the artist in his renowned New York gallery. This striking portrait presents him in an informal pose but with a certain psychic tension. The sitter is seen in profile, on the edge of his seat, his hands clasped, his eyes attentively fixed before him, enveloped by the picturesque disorder in the painter's studio.

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Lucy Hessel watches over a game of hide-and-seek between her daughter, Lulu, and Vuillard's godson, Jean-Claude Bellier, the child of Jos Hessel's business partner. Under a brilliant blue sky, in the dappled shade of the great park's trees, the children are scarcely distinguishable from their surroundings, bathed in a bucolic ambience. Thus Vuillard creates an Arcadian portrait of his lover in her later years.

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In this magnificent late work, the yellow dining room at Les Clayes is filled with guests at table. Lulu Hessel is at the center of the gathering, which includes her mother, Lucy, to the right and, next to her, Romain Coolus. With a quick hand and bright, spontaneous brushwork, Vuillard conjures up a scene of gleaming luxury. Flowers, crystal, and mirrors abound, rendered in sparkling highlights and reflections. The scene’s grandeur is eighteenth-century but the decor is distinctly modern, from the electric chandelier to the Art Deco doors and overdoor panels. In its large scale and free, energetic execution, Vuillard celebrates a world in which society and art are one.

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An aviary of exotic birds formed one of the diversions in the gardens at Les Clayes. The scale of this picture suggests that Vuillard may have intended to make a decorative mural panel or suite of panels, but the work remained in his studio at his death. The scene evokes the winter of 1939, when France and Germany were preparing for war. The gray tonalities, the desolate landscape, the twisting branches of the leafless trees, and the peacock—emblem of earthly splendor—wandering through an alien season, eloquently convey a sense of impending tragedy.

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