Painting: The Quiet Observer

Edouard Vuillard was, in his own words, an armchair painter. In search of subject matter, he rarely ventured beyond the Montmartre apartment he shared with his mother, and then only to the homes of his few close friends. The apartment also served as his mother's dressmaking shop; it was constantly alive with seamstresses and customers exchanging confidences about fittings, and cluttered with bolts of satins and silks, ribbons and pattern snippings. In this homely setting, Vuillard, who derisively referred to himself as "the in-timist," fashioned vignettes of quiet domesticity that suggest a less radiant, fin de siècle Vermeer.

This summer, marking the centenary of Vuillard's birth, Paris' Musée de L'Orangerie has mounted a retrospective of his works (see color opposite), which are displayed along with those of his brother-in-law and lifelong friend, Ker-Xavier Roussel. Both were contributors to the mighty explosion that was impressionism, but their visual worlds were quite different. Vuillard was essentially a realist, a chronicler of bourgeois life. Roussel, with his nymphs and gods, was a dreamer, trying to transplant classical Greece into the French landscape.

Subtle Materials. Vuillard was the greater artist, but it was his schoolboy friendship with Roussel that steered him to painting. When Roussel enrolled with an art teacher, Vuillard decided that he also wanted to be a painter, and succeeded in enrolling at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Unhappy with its rigid academicism, he transferred to the somewhat freer atmosphere of the Academic Julian, where he met Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Vallotton. Calling themselves the Nabis (Hebrew for prophets), they formed a group to perpetuate Gauguin's theories on painting, Mallarme's on poetry. "To name an object," the symbolist poet had written, "is to do away with three-quarters of the enjoyment. To suggest it, to evoke it —that is what charms the imagination." The art of suggestion, Vuillard discovered, required subtle materials; oil on canvas seemed too shiny and thick. He started painting on unprepared pasteboard, which absorbed some of the color. He also turned to pastels for sketching, and experimented with powdered colors. Success came early and easy, but it frightened him. "I must look out," he said. "Well-meaning patrons may disturb my routine." By 1914, however, the spotlight had shifted from post-impressionism to the angry, angular new vision of fauves and cubists. Vuillard stopped exhibiting and retreated into nearly three decades of private work. Only in 1938, two years before his death, did he break his self-imposed withdrawal and consent to a large Paris exhibition.

Vuillard believed that it was not how much you saw but how well you looked, and his living-room studio provided him with material enough—including a passing parade of models. One who caught his eye was a graceful seamstress who arrived for work one day wearing a scarf designed to protect and cleverly disguise the fact that she had the mumps. And then there was his mother, who lived to be 90. "My muse," he called her. He painted her bent over the sewing machine, stitching before the window, feeding her grandchild, and watering the flowers. Her hair changed color over the decades, the wrinkles deepened in her face, and still Vuillard never tired of portraying her.