Edouard Vuillard 1868 - 1940

Edouard Vuillard was born into a Parisian family on 11 November, 1868 at Cuiseaux, Saone-et-Lo where his father, a retired army officer, held the post of tax collector. His mother, born of a family of textile designers and twenty-seven years younger than her husband, had previously borne two children, Alexandre and Marie, who was to marry Vuillard’s closest friend and fellow artist Ker-Xavier Roussel.

The Vuillard family moved to Paris when Edouard was ten years old. There, he entered the Lycée Condorcet in 1884, a move which would prove decisive for this future artist’s intellectual development. For it was at this Lycée (also attended by Marcel Proust) that Vuillard met the Ker-Xavier Roussel and Maurice Denis and took up painting instead of pursuing his original desire for a military career. A few years later at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts Vuillard came under the tutelage of Jean-Léon Gérome, a Salon master famous for the deadly precision with which he reconstructed Oriental scenes. Gérome’s unimaginative teaching, however, permanently alienated Vuillard from academic art. Disenchanted, Vuillard switched from the Beaux-Arts to the Académie Julian where he suddenly found himself in a hotbed of gifted young rebels, most notably Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, as well as Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson and Félix Vallotton -- in short, the Nabis of the immediate future.

Inspired by the Brittany paintings of Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, the Nabis were a diverse group of artists who joined together in 1888, imbued with the common goal of transcending Impressionism with an emphasis on pure visual sensation. Unlike the other Nabis, though, Vuillard was largely indifferent to pure theory and would often remain silent while his friends heatedly discussed the nature of art.

It is significant that the only period in his painting life when Vuillard did follow strictly theoretical ideas was the very beginning (around 1890) when he painted with particularly Gauguinesque colors, eliminated detail, and subjugated subject matter to decorative design. These daring early paintings reflect the dictum of Maurice Denis (the chief Nabis theoretician) that a painting is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order. Such fascinating experiments promoted theory over personal predilections. Vuillard was to discover his own personal path into the poetic significance of everyday life, developing an "intimist" style of which he remains the incomparable master.

This intimist style (so powerfully revealed especially in his paintings of his mother sitting in various rooms) had its roots in the style of Dutch ‘little masters’ which was very much in vogue around 1890. Representations of homely subjects, darkish interiors, children at play, and genre scenes with more feeling than action abounded in Paris galleries. Eugène Carrière’s studies of maternity, Van Gogh’s old shoes, and even Cézanne’s card players can fit into this category. In portraying what Vuillard knew and loved best, namely his family and friends, he developed his style to the fullest. An air of secrecy envelopes his intimate paintings and drawings. Aware of this, the artist once exclaimed, "It is dreadful, revealing all these secrets!".