Art: The Insider

Edouard Vuillard was not a simple painter, and his subtle, qualified vision endeared him to some of the most complex minds in France. "Too fastidious for plain statement, he proceeds by insinuation," André Gide wrote of him in 1905. "There is nothing sentimental or highfalutin about the discreet melancholy which pervades his work. Its dress is that of everyday. It is tender and caressing, and if it were not for the mastery that already marks it, I should call it timid. For all his success, I can sense in Vuillard the charm of anxiety and doubt."

Perhaps no good artist is wholly forgotten, but partial eclipses happen all the time. One shadowed Vuillard, who, between his birth in 1868 and his death in 1940, became one of the most respected names in French art. The respect, however, turned into the kind that tails off into a cough and a pause. No doubt Vuillard's own modesty contributed to the situation; thus between 1912 and 1938, the years when the big reputations were consolidating, he never had a one-man show in Paris. So it happened that Vuillard was tagged as a "minor master" and left in the waiting room of history. The needed reassessment has now begun with a magnificent Vuillard retrospective organized by English Critic John Russell for the National Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (later it will travel to the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Art Institute of Chicago).

Pretty Safe. Vuillard's background was Catholic and his upbringing strict. The son of an army officer turned provincial tax collector, Vuillard seems always to have been the soul of probity. He was forever conscious of being one of an elite, thanks partly to his education at the Lycée Concordet, one of the most demanding schools in Paris. "I think I am pretty safe in saying," wrote a friend, "that from his adolescence, every day of Vuillard's life has presented itself to him in the rainbow light of a moral predicament . . . Vuillard takes everything to heart." One might not infer that from Vuillard's subject matter, which conjures an intimate world of material satisfactions: the Third Republic interiors, with their mottled wallpaper and yellow light glowing thickly on well-stuffed chairs: the clutter of books, statuettes, lamps, dishes, forks; the poetry of possession. One of his portrait subjects is said to have told her maid to hide the cold cream, because "M. Vuillard never leaves anything out." She was, in a sense, wrong; Vuillard's eye for the telling shape was methodically acute. A domestic interior like Marthe Mellot: The Garden Gate (1910) seems the product of quite casual observation. Scrutinized, it becomes as composed as architecture in every detail —even down to the assonances between the checkered glass panes in the doors and the pattern of the matting, or the placement of the white dog. Vuillard had an exquisite, wry sense of the moment—the quirky gesture, the sudden giggle, the whole dictionary of body language.