Biography
Edouard Vuillard’s (*1868 Cuiseaux FR | †1940 La Baule-Escoblac FR) artistic vision gives the viewer a discreetly humorous record of the Belle Epoque of the late 1880s to 1914. His work straddled two centuries: he was a major post-impressionist in the 1890s, as well as a participant in the renewal of decorative art after 1900. This rebellious co-founder of the avant-garde group Les Nabis is best known for his provocative paintings of lush middle-class interiors and his contributions to avant-garde theatre.
Vuillard, the son of a soldier turned tax collector, was not predisposed to take to painting in his youth, let alone make a success of it. Soldiering and the public service formed the background of his childhood in a sleepy commune in Burgundy, in eastern France. When in 1877 the family moved to Paris he experienced the arts for the first time. At school, Vuillard befriended the future artists Maurice Denis and Ker-Xavier Roussel. After undergoing a religious crisis at the age of sixteen, he decided to join Roussel in setting up as an apprentice-painter. Afterwards, he attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts, where he met Bonnard and Sérusier, together they formed a group of dissident students. They considered themselves to be the prophets (or 'nabi' in Hebrew and Arabic) of a new art movement, the Nabis and were determined to rid their art of any trace of academicism. They painted in a synthesized manner with paint straight from the tube and with almost no mixture of white, using the color theory and artistic philosophy of Paul Gauguin.
It is specifically the abstracted forms and Synthetist colors that are visible in Vuillard’s work from the 1890s onwards. However, in contrast to other Nabi painters whose range of subject matter incorporated religious, esoteric, and 'primitive' themes, Vuillard’s paintings were of domestic interiors, interiors that conventionally symbolized the enclosed domain of women. For Vuillard, home, the core of his existence, was a series of modest, unassuming Paris interiors shared with his extended family. Although he was financially successful in his lifetime, he lived with his widowed mother until the age of 60. It was his mother, whom he referred to as his ‘muse’, who posed for his work more frequently than any other model. Most art historians now consider the 1890s Vuillard’s greatest decade.
By 1900, Vuillard increasingly found his subjects outside his home environment. Never really a ‘society painter’, he captured the behind-the-scenes lives of the beau monde, expanding his range to landscapes and portraiture. By 1910 Vuillard had developed his mature style and earned a place between the greats of French artistic tradition - Chardin, Corot, Cezanne, and Puvis de Chavannes. Between 1900 and 1940 he moved toward a more luminous style. He experimented increasingly with abstraction and powerful color in a manner comparable to Matisse and the Fauves. He nevertheless retained the flat, decorative quality of Nabi painting. He passed away in 1940 at the age of 71. His work can be currently found in numerous collections across the world including the Musée D’Orsay and the Louvre, Paris, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Belgium, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.