Édouard Vuillard

gigatos | March 31, 2022

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Summary

Jean Édouard Vuillard born November 12, 1868 in Cuiseaux (Saône-et-Loire) and died in La Baule (Loire-Atlantique) June 21, 1940 is a French painter, designer, engraver and illustrator.

A founding member of the Nabi movement, he distinguished himself in figure painting, portraiture, interiors, still life, intimate scenes, mural compositions and theater sets.

Édouard Vuillard is the son of Joseph François Henri Vuillard and his wife, née Alexandrine Justinienne Marie Michaud. At his birth, his father was a tax collector. His grandparents were from the Haut-Jura on his father”s side, and from the Haut-Jura and Paris on his mother”s side.

Vuillard was raised in Paris in a modest family. He attended the Lycée Condorcet, where he met Maurice Denis, Pierre Hermant, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Paul Sérusier and Pierre Veber. His father died when he was twenty years old and his mother made a living by sewing. His older brother Alexandre entered the military career and left the family home early. Édouard Vuillard was influenced by the women in his family: his mother, his grandmother and his older sister, who later married his best friend, the painter Ker-Xavier Roussel. Édouard Vuillard lived with his mother until the age of sixty, when she died. In 1885, he left high school and joined Ker-Xavier Roussel, his closest friend, at the studio of the painter Diogène Maillart. There they received the rudiments of artistic education. Vuillard began to attend the Louvre Museum and decided to pursue a career in art, breaking with the family tradition that had destined him for the army.

In March 1886, he entered the Académie Julian, where his teacher was Tony Robert-Fleury. In June 1887, on his third attempt, he was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The following year, for six weeks, his teacher was Jean-Léon Gérôme. During his studies, Vuillard became interested in realistic still lifes and domestic interiors. He was particularly interested in German artists of the 17th century.

Later, Vuillard also painted large decorative panels depicting landscapes.

In 1889, Maurice Denis convinced him to join a small dissident group from the Académie Julian, which produced works marked by symbolism and spirituality, and which proclaimed itself the “brotherhood of the Nabis. Paul Sérusier developed in the Nabi group a love of the synthesist method, which relied on memory and imagination more than on direct observation. Vuillard, at first reluctant to the idea that the painter does not seek to reproduce realistically what he sees, eventually, around 1890, tried his hand at his first synthetic works.

Jos Hessel was his exclusive dealer and patron whose wife, Lucy, was his favorite model, but also his mistress for many years; he depicted her in The Alley in 1907. Between the wars, the painter often stayed with them at the Château des Clayes (Yvelines). The castle and its park were a source of inspiration for many works (Sous-bois au printemps au château des Clayes, Le Parc du château des Clayes, etc.). A square in the town has since been named after him.

Pierre Bonnard in 1910 sketched his profile portrait which was preserved in a Mellon collection in 1966, as well as a self-portrait from 1891.

Vuillard painted many interior scenes, especially with his mother, until her death in 1928. The gentle atmosphere of these scenes of daily life, which he made a favorite subject, qualified him as an “intimist” artist. He disputed, however, that he found most of his inspiration in these “familiar places”. “Vuillard never had his models pose, he would catch them in their homes, in the setting that was familiar to them. His mother would fill a carafe, K. X. Roussel was reading a newspaper, the singer was at her piano, the businessman at his table, the children at their games, and the painter would say to them: “Don”t move, stay like that! He would then make a sketch, and in that first vision, the whole picture could be found. Some of his works will require months, even years of work, but once completed they will retain the freshness of the first vision” (Antoine Salomon).

He was elected member of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1938. In early June 1940, he fell ill.

His friends Lucy and Jos Hessel, who had decided to leave the capital in the face of advancing German troops, did not want to leave him alone in Paris and took him to La Baule where he died a few weeks later at the Castel Marie-Louise. He was buried in Paris, in the Batignolles cemetery (26th division).

Also read, biographies – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Works and decorative projects

While painting intimist format paintings, Vuillard created many commissioned decorative ensembles to adorn apartments, mansions and villas, especially for his patron-friends, the Natanson brothers, creators of La Revue blanche. This creation is part of the Nabi spirit, based on the aesthetics of Albert Aurier or the Arts & Crafts movement, which aims to abolish the boundaries between major and minor arts and to bring art into the framework of everyday life.

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Decorative panels

In his memoirs, Jan Verkade, a Nabi artist and future monk-painter, testifies to the enthusiasm shared by young artists around the beginning of 1890 for wall painting or decorative panels: “No more easel paintings! Down with useless furniture! Painting must not usurp a freedom that isolates it from other arts. The painter”s work begins when the architect considers his own to be finished.” Interested more in the integration of painting into architecture than in the isolated easel painting, Vuillard and other Nabis artists practiced many interior decorations, including the decorative panel.

Alexandre Natanson commissioned Vuillard in 1893 to paint this suite of panels to decorate the dining room or living room of his mansion, located at 60, avenue du Bois (now 74, avenue Foch) in Paris.

A Parisian amateur, Dr. Louis Henri Vaquez, commissioned these panels from Vuillard to decorate the library of his apartment, located at 27, rue du Général-Foy in Paris.

Intended for the writer Claude Anet, pseudonym of Jean Schopfer, these two panels present the scene of the country house of Thadée and Misia Natanson, “Les Relais”, in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where the couple liked to receive their friends.

Faced with the rise of photography, the function of engraving had to be rethought. It went beyond its original role of reproduction of works of art, while soliciting the creativity and originality of the artist who made it. Then the revolution of the color lithography technique facilitated the development of this graphic art.

Vuillard began to practice black lithography in 1893. He drew several illustrations for books and theatrical programs. In 1899, a beautiful suite of color lithographs, entitled Landscape and Interiors, was published by a famous art dealer, Ambroise Vollard. Vuillard also created several etchings towards the end of his life.

Also read, biographies – Charles Edward Stuart

Location unknown

Through his friendship with Lugné-Poe, who was one of the great reformers of the theatrical world in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, Vuillard became involved in the staging of idealist theater, particularly in the 1890s. Vuillard shared a studio, located at 28, rue Pigalle in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, with Lugné-Poe, Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, from the early 1890s.

He accompanied Lugné-Poe to rehearsals at the Paris Conservatory, which the latter had attended, and to the Comédie-Française, where Lugné-Poe tried to find patrons for the young painter friends by showing their works to the actors. Vuillard left some drawings and watercolors that depict the actors (for example, Coquelin-Cadet) in their roles.

In 1890, Vuillard began to collaborate with experimental theaters. First, he drew a lithographed program, in color, of Monsieur Bute, a play by Maurice Biollay (November 26, 1890), for André Antoine”s Théâtre-Libre, in which Lugné-Poe was an actor. He also made projects of programs for this naturalist theater, but they did not result in lithographed programs.

He then participated in the Théâtre d”Art founded in 1890 by a poet, Paul Fort. While his collaboration with the Théâtre-Libre remained rather limited, Vuillard, as well as other Nabis, established a deeper complicity between this idealist theater, supported by Symbolist intellectuals, and the regulars of the Café Voltaire, such as Édouard Dujardin, André Fontainas, Jean Moréas or Alfred Valette, director of the Mercure de France and husband of Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery). Vuillard was solicited, like other Nabis, not only for the illustration of programs, such as Le Concile féerique, a play by Jules Laforgue, staged on December 11, 1891, and for the creation of sets and costumes. Some of his drawings were published in the magazine Livre d”Art, of which Paul Fort was director and Remy de Gourmont editor, which appeared in May 1892. He created the set for La Farce du pâté et de la tarte, for which Maurice Denis designed the puppets and the costumes made by Marie Vuillard, Édouard”s sister, and France Ranson, the wife of Paul Ranson, who illustrated the program.

The original and rich, but short-lived experience of the Art Theater, was entrusted to the Theater of the Work, whose founders were Lugné-Poe, Camille Mauclair and Vuillard. The latter gave the name “Œuvre”, which he had found by chance while turning the pages of a dictionary, and he is one of the most assiduous collaborators of this theater, especially in the first seasons.

Vuillard designed the set and the program for Henrik Ibsen”s Rosmersholm, which Lugné-Poe appreciated: “Édouard Vuillard was prestigious for his economic invention and ingenuity in creating the stage decoration and the atmosphere? The set of the second act gave distinction and intimacy to our play. For the first time, Ibsen was really played in Paris. The drama was presented with a very beautiful litho by Vuillard, the first of the series of litho-programs of which “the work” had to be proud. But the conditions in which these sets were often made were precarious.

Of the other program designers in the Work, Vuillard created the most, including those for Ibsen”s An Enemy of the People (1893), Solness the Builder (1894), and The Supports of Society (1896), Âmes solitaires (1893) by Gerhart Hauptmann, Au-dessus des forces humaines (1894 and 1897) by Björnstjerne Björnson, L”Image (1894) and La Vie muette (1894) by Maurice Beaubourg, La Gardienne (1894) by Henri de Régnier.

Programs lithographed by Vuillard

(title of play, author of play, date of performance at the theater)

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