Jean-Édouard Vuillard (; 11 November 186821 June 1940) was a French painter, decorative artist, and printmaker. From 1891 through 1900, Vuillard was a member of the avant garde artistic group Les Nabis, creating paintings that assembled areas of pure color. His interior scenes, influenced by Japanese prints, explored the spatial effects of flattened planes of color, pattern, and form. As a decorative artist, Vuillard painted theater sets, panels for interior decoration, and designed plates and stained glass. After 1900, when the Nabis broke up, Vuillard adopted a more realistic style, approaching landscapes and interiors with greater detail and vivid colors. In the 1920s and 1930s, he painted portraits of figures in French industry and the arts in their familiar settings.
Vuillard was influenced by Paul Gauguin, among other post-impressionist painters.
Early life Jean-Édouard Vuillard was born on 11 November 1868 in Cuiseaux (Saône-et-Loire), where he spent his youth. Vuillard's father was a retired naval captain who became a tax collector after leaving the military. His father was 27 years older than his mother, Marie Vuillard (née Michaud), who was a seamstress.
After his father's retirement in 1877, the family settled in Paris at 18 Rue de Chabrol, then moved to a building on Rue Daunou where his mother had a sewing workshop. Vuillard entered a school run by the Marist Brothers. He was awarded a scholarship to attend the prestigious Lycée Fontaine, which in 1883 became the Lycée Condorcet. Vuillard studied rhetoric and art, making drawings of works by Michelangelo and classical sculptures. At the Lycée he met several of the future Nabis, including Ker-Xavier Roussel (Vuillard's future brother in law), Maurice Denis, writer Pierre Véber, and the future actor and theater director Aurélien Lugné-Poe.
In November 1885, when Vuillard left the Lycée, he gave up his original idea of following his father in a military career, and set out to become an artist. He joined Roussel at the studio of painter Diogène Maillart, in the former studio of Eugène Delacroix on Place Fürstenberg. There, Roussel and Vuillard learned the rudiments of painting. In 1885, Vuillard took courses at the Académie Julian, and frequented the studios of the academic painters William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Robert-Fleury. However, he failed in the competitions to enter the École des Beaux-Arts in February and July 1886 and again in February 1887. In July 1887, the persistent Vuillard was accepted, and was placed in the course of Robert-Fleury, then in 1888 with the academic history painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. In 1888 and 1889, he pursued his studies in academic art. He painted a self-portrait with his friend Waroquoy, and had a crayon portrait of his grandmother accepted for the Salon of 1889. At the end of that academic year, and after a brief period of military service, he set out to become an artist.
Les Nabis
Late in 1889, Vuillard began to frequent meetings of the informal group of artists known as Les Nabis, or The prophets, a semi-secret, semi-mystical club that included Maurice Denis and some of his other friends from the Lycée. In 1888, the young painter Paul Sérusier had traveled to Brittany, where, under the direction of Paul Gauguin, he had made a nearly abstract painting of the seaport, composed of areas of color. This composition, The Talisman, became the first Nabi painting. Serusier and his friend Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Paul Ranson, were among the first Nabis of nabiim, dedicated to transforming art down to its foundations. In 1890, through Denis, Vuillard became a member of the group, which met in Ransom's studio or in the cafes of the Passage Brady. The existence of the organization was in theory secret, and members used coded nicknames; Vuillard became the Nabi Zouave, because of his military service.
Vuillard first worked on theater decoration. He shared a studio at 28 Rue Pigalle with Bonnard with the theater impresario Lugné-Poe, and the theater critic Georges Rousel. There, Vuillard designed sets for several works by Maeterlinck and other symbolist writers. In 1891, he took part in his first exposition with the Nabis at the Chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He showed two paintings, including The Woman in a Striped Dress. The reviews were largely good, but the critic of Le Chat Noir wrote of "Works still indecisive, where one finds the features in style, literary shadows, sometimes a tender harmony." (19 September 1891).
Vuillard began keeping a journal during this time, which records the formation of his artistic philosophy. "We perceive nature through the senses which give us images of forms, sounds, colors, etc." he wrote on 22 November 1888, shortly before he became a Nabi. "A form or a color exists only in relation to another. Form does not exist on its own. We can only conceive of the relations."Paroles d'Artiste – Édouard Vuillard. Éditions Fage, Paris (2019), p. 10 In 1890 he returned to the same idea: "Let's look at a painting as a set of relations that are definitely detached from any idea of naturalism."Paroles d'Artiste – Édouard Vuillard. Éditions Fage, Paris (2019), p. 8
The Japanese influence The works of Vuillard and the Nabis were strongly influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, which were shown in Paris at the gallery of art dealer Siegfried Bing, and at a large show at the École des Beaux Arts in 1890. Vuillard himself acquired a personal collection of 180 prints, some of which are visible in the backgrounds of his paintings. The Japanese influence appeared particularly in his work in the negation of depth, the simplicity of forms, and strongly contrasting colors. The faces were often turned away, and drawn with just a few lines. There was no attempt to create perspective. Vegetal, floral and geometric designs in the wallpaper or clothing were more important than the faces. In some of Vuillard's works, the persons in the paintings almost entirely disappeared into the designs of the wallpaper. The Japanese influence continued in his later, post-Nabi works, particularly in the painted screens depicting Place Vintimille he made for Marguerite Chaplin.Jolin, Camille, Les Nabis et le Japon, in Les Nabis et Le Decor, L'Objet d'Art March 2019, pp. 21–27
Decoration Vuillard, like other members of the Nabis, believed that decorative art was equal to traditional easel painting. Vuillard created theatrical sets and programs, decorative murals and painted screens, prints, designs for stained glass windows, and ceramic plates.Jolin, Camille, Les Nabis et le Japon, in Le Beau dans le quotidien, L'Objet d'Art March 2019, pp. 21–27. In the early 1890s, he worked especially for the Théâtre de l'Œuvre of Lugné-Poe designing backdrops and programs.
From theater decoration, Vuillard soon moved into interior decoration. In the course of his theater work, he met brothers Alexandre and Thadée Natanson, the founders of La Revue Blanche, a cultural review. Vuillard's graphics appeared in the journal, together with Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Félix Vallotton and others.Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890–1940 at The Jewish Museum In 1892, on a commission for Natanson brothers, Vuillard painted his first decorations ("apartment frescoes") for the house of Mme Desmarais. He made other items in 1894 for Alexandre Natanson, and in 1898 for Claude Anet.
Vuillard used some of the same techniques he had used in the theater for making scenery, such as , or distemper, which allowed him to make large panels more quickly. This method, originally used in Renaissance frescoes, involved using rabbit-skin glue as a binder mixed with chalk and white pigment to make gesso, a smooth coating applied to wood panels or canvas, on which the painting was made. This allowed the painter to achieve finer detail and color than on canvas, and was waterproof. In 1892, Vuillard received his first decorative commission to make six paintings to be placed above the doorways of the salon of the family of Paul Desmarais. He designed his panels and murals to fit into the architectural setting and the interests of the client.
In 1894, Vuillard and the other Nabis received a commission from art gallery owner Siegfried Bing, who had given Art Nouveau its name, to design stained glass windows to be made by the American firm of Louis Tiffany. Their designs were displayed in 1895 at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, but the actual windows were never made. In 1895, he designed a series of decorative porcelain plates, decorated with faces and figures of women in modern dress, immersed in floral designs. The plates, along with his design for the Tiffany window and the decorative panels made for the Natansons, were displayed at the opening of Bing's gallery Maison de l'Art Nouveau in December 1895.
The Public Gardens Some of Vuillard's best-known works, including Les Jardins Publiques (The Public Gardens) and Figures dans un Interieur (Figures in an Interior) were made for the Natanson brothers, whom he had known at the Lycée Condorcet, and for their friends. They gave Vuillard freedom to choose the subjects and style. Between 1892 and 1899, Vuillard made eight cycles of decorative paintings, with altogether some thirty panels. The murals, though rarely displayed during his lifetime, later became among his most famous works.
The Public Gardens is a series of six panels depicting children in the parks of Paris. The patrons, Alexander Natanson and his wife Olga, had three young daughters. The paintings show a variety of different inspirations, including the medieval tapestries at the Hotel de Cluny in Paris that Vuillard greatly appreciated. For this series Vuillard did not use oil paint, but , a method he had used in painting theater sets, which required him to work very quickly, but allowed him to make modifications and to achieve the appearance of frescoes. He received the commission on 24 August 1894, and completed the series at the end of the same year. They were installed in the dining room/salon of the Natansons.
Interior scenes Vuillard frequently painted interior scenes, usually of women in a workplace, at home, or in a garden. The faces and features of the figures in these scenes are rarely articulated in detail; instead Vuillard often places greater focus on the patterns and planes of wallpaper, carpets, and furnishings.
Vuillard wrote in his journal in 1890, "In the decoration of an apartment, and overly-precise subject can easily become intolerable. One might less quickly get tired of a textile, or drawings without too much literal precision."Journal, 6 September 1890, Paroles d'Artiste- Édouard Vuillard, p. 30 He also preferred to populate his interiors with women. As he wrote in his journal in 1894, "When my attention is directed toward men, I see only gross caricatures... I never feel so with women, where I always find the means to isolate a few elements which satisfy me as a painter. It's not that men are uglier than women, they're only so in my imagination."Journal, 27 July 1894, Paroles d'Artiste- Édouard Vuillard, p. 30
Vuillard painted a series of paintings of seamstresses in the workshop of a dressmaker, based on the workshop of his mother. In La Robe à Ramages (The Flowered Dress; 1891), the women in the workshop are assembled out of areas of color. The faces, seen from the side, have no details. The patterns of their costumes and the decor dominate the pictures. The figures include his grandmother, to the left, and his sister Marie, in the bold patterned dress that is a central feature of the painting. He also placed a mirror on the wall to the left, a device which allowed him to give two points of view simultaneously and to reflect and distort the scene. The result is a work that is deliberately flattened and decorative.