Édouard Vuillard received a scholarship to continue his education in 1884 and he went to the Lycée Condorcet, which he left in 1885.
College/University
Gallery of Édouard Vuillard
14 Rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris, France
After three unsuccessful attempts, Vuillard eventually passed the entrance examination to the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts.
Career
Gallery of Édouard Vuillard
1898
Les Nabis at Stephane Natanson’s house in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, south-east of Paris, c. 1898. Standing: Cipa (half-brother of Misia Natanson). Seated, from left: Felix Valloton, Édouard Vuillard, Stephane Natanson, Marthe Mellot, Thadée Natanson and Misia Natanson.
Gallery of Édouard Vuillard
1899
Ker-Xavier Roussel, Édouard Vuillard, Romain Coolus, Félix Vallotton.
Gallery of Édouard Vuillard
1899
Italy
Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard during a trip to Italy in 1899. Photo restored and colorized by painters-in-colour.
Gallery of Édouard Vuillard
Edouard Vuillard.
Gallery of Édouard Vuillard
Edouard Vuillard.
Gallery of Édouard Vuillard
Vuillard and Alfred Natanson in front of the Relay in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. Residence of Misia and Thadée Natanson.
Les Nabis at Stephane Natanson’s house in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, south-east of Paris, c. 1898. Standing: Cipa (half-brother of Misia Natanson). Seated, from left: Felix Valloton, Édouard Vuillard, Stephane Natanson, Marthe Mellot, Thadée Natanson and Misia Natanson.
Jean-Édouard Vuillard was a French painter and printmaker. He was a member of the group of French painters who called themselves Nabis, and also a representative of the Post-Impressionism art movement. He is mainly known for his depictions of intimate interior scenes.
Background
Édouard Vuillard was born in Cuiseaux, Saone-et-Loire, France, on November 11, 1868. In 1878 his family moved to Paris. Vuillard's father was a retired army captain. He was 27 years older than Édouard Vuillard's mother Marie Vuillard (Michaud). His father died in 1884.
Education
Édouard Vuillard received a scholarship to continue his education in 1884 and he went to the Lycée Condorcet. There he met Ker Xavier Roussel (also a painter and Vuillard's future brother-in-law), musician Pierre Hermant, Maurice Denis, and writer Pierre Véber, among others. Édouard Vuillard visited the Louvre regularly. It influenced his intention to become an artist.
In 1885 Vuillard left the Lycée Condorcet and followed an advice of his closest friend, Roussel, to join him at the studio of painter Diogène Maillart. There, they received the basic knowledge of artistic training. In March 1886, Vuillard started his education at the Académie Julian (now part of ESAG Penninghen) where he was taught by Tony Robert-Fleury, and met Pierre Bonnard, with whom he shared a studio.
In July of the following year, after three unsuccessful attempts, he passed the entrance examination to the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He was taught under the guidance of Jean-Léon Gérôme for a brief period of about six weeks in 1888. Starting from 1888 Édouard Vuillard was keeping a journal in which he made sketches of works he was studying in the Louvre and noted down ideas about future paintings.
In the year 1889, he joined a group of art students that included Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, and Félix Vallotton. The group was called the Nabis (Hebrew for "Prophets"), and they were inspired by the Synthetist paintings of Paul Gauguin’s Pont-Aven period.
In his early works, Vuillard was attracted to the realistic study of still lifes and domestic interiors. He was also drawn to the 17th-century Dutch artists and to the works of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. Vuillard kept his private journal with sketches from 1888 to 1905 and, later, from 1907 to 1940.
In 1892, on the advice of the brothers Alexandre and Thadée Natanson, Édouard Vuillard painted his first decorations ("apartment frescoes") for the house of Mademoiselle Desmarais. Subsequently, he fulfilled many other commissions of this kind. Along with other members of Les Nabis, he displayed small-scale works at the Le Barc de Boutteville Gallery. Later in the 1890s, he showed his work through Ambroise Vollard. In 1897 Vollard commissioned Édouard Vuillard to create a series of colour lithographs on the themes of landscapes and interiors.
Vuillard was greatly influenced by the simplification and emphasis on the expressive contour of 19th-century Japanese woodcuts, like other Nabi artists. In the early 1890s, he worked for the Théâtre de l'Œuvre of Lugné-Poe designing settings and programs. The theater had also an important impact on his choice of subjects and particular light effects.
Édouard Vuillard's closest friend in the theatre was Aurelien Lugne-Poe who, along with Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art introduced Symbolist drama to Paris. Vuillard had a chance to attend many of the latter's rehearsals and performances of plays by Maurice Maeterlinck, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and others.
In 1898 he travelled to Venice and Florence. The following year he visited London. Later he went to Milan, Venice and Spain. Vuillard also made trips to Brittany and Normandy.
Vuillard first presented his artworks at the Salon des Indépendants of 1901 and at the Salon d'Automne in 1903. In the early years of the 20th century, Vuillard began to show his paintings at the Parisian gallery of the Bernheim-Jeune family and was later contracted to them.
By the 1910s, Vuillard began to create his domestic scenes and portraits with a much more evident sense of depth, and portraiture was an increasingly significant genre in his oeuvre. Among his sitters were members of fashionable society and personal friends or professional colleagues.
During the First World War, he was called to serve for a short period of time in 1914 as a railway lookout near Paris. He later served as a war artist, depicting soldiers on the front line. However, his style and interest in subject matter were, for the most part, not affected by the outbreak of World War I. The artist continued to concentrate on decorative schemes, though his success would not match his output in the 1890s and the early-20th century. His occasional commissions included four portraits of Roussel, Denis, Bonnard, and Maillol of the Nabis, displayed at the Exposition Internationale in Paris in 1937, and a final major mural project for the League of Nations Building, the Palais des Nations, Geneva, in 1939.
He served as a juror with Florence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal, a grant given between 1919-1954 to young French painters, sculptors, engravers, decorators, writers, and musicians.
Valloton and Misia in the Dining Room at Rue Saint-Florentin
Window overlooking the Woods
The Table Setting
The Table
In the Red Room
The Chestnuts
The Tuileries Gardens, Paris
Princess Bibesco (Marthe Lahovary)
The Avenue
Woman Brushing a Garment
A Somber Dress
The two sisters
Black Dress
Man and Woman beneath a Tree
Tennis Game by the Sea
Seated Nude
The Salon of Madame Aron
Madame Vuillard at the Hotel
Tulips and Statuettes
Seated Woman Dressed in Black
Self-Portrait
The First Steps
Nude on an Orange Rug
The Vestibule at Saint Jacut de la mer
The Comb
Interior with mother and sister of the artist
The Reader
Silver Trees
Study of a Woman in a Petticoat
Guelder Roses and the Venus of Milo
Garden in Cannes
Breakfast
The friends around the table, St. Jacut
The Green Interior or Figure in front of a Window with Drawn
Vase of Flowers
The End of Breakfast at Madam Vuillard
Portrait of Thadée Natanson
The Window
After the lunch
Woman in Front of the Fireplace
Interior of the work-table
Madame Losse Hessel in Vuillard's Studio
Breton House
Home Maxime
Woman with a Hat
Portrait of a Woman in Profile
The garden outside the workshop
Public Gardens
Madame Vuillard Seated
The Thread
The Discussion
The Striped Blouse
Painting of a tennis court Castle Guernon Ranville
Anemones in a Chinese
Good Children
Trees in a Field
Autoportrait
Woman with Hat
Self-Portrait
Massif near the house
Under the Portico
The Tent
The First Class Compartment
First Fruit
The Dining Room
Interior
The Cake Shop
Woman with a Cup of Coffee
Madame Vuillard at Table
Theodore Duret
Mother and Child
Sacha Guitry in His Dressing Room
Square Berlioz (La Place Vintimille)
The Flowered Dress
In front of a Tapestry
Romain Coolus (writer in La Revuew Blanche)
Studio Interior, Model for the Scenery of La Lepreuse
The Little Restaurant
Madame Vuillard at Table
Boulevard of Battignolles
After the Ball
Yvonne Printemps and Sacha Guitry
Woman with Black Eyebrows
My Grandmother
The Damepartie
Views
Quotations:
"Who speaks of art speaks of poetry. There is not art without a poetic aim. There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting."
"We perceive nature through the senses, which give us images of forms of colour, sounds etc. A form which exists only in relation to another form on its own, it does not exist."
"The painter’s instrument is his armchair."
"There is no art without a poetic aim."
"The expressive techniques of painting are capable of conveying an analogy but not an impossible photograph of a moment."
"Nothing is important save the spiritual state that enables one to subjectify one's thoughts to a sensation and to think only of the sensation, all the while searching to express it."
"To say that a thing is beautiful is simply an act of faith, not a measurement on some kind of scale."
"I do not belong to any school, I simply want to do something that is personal to my self."
"Conceive of a picture really as a series of harmonies."
Personality
Édouard Vuillard was a likeable man who inspired affection in those close to him. He was of a reserved and quiet personality, though capable of expressing accumulated emotion in sudden outbursts. He was suspicious of some of the more distinguished of his contemporaries, such as Gauguin, and preferred to associate himself with the achievements of such artists as Monet, Degas or Puvis de Chavannes.
He chose his words carefully and thought deeply about his art, as can be seen from his letters with Maurice Denis in 1898, published in Denis’s Journal. He frequently agonized over his personal conduct. Notwithstanding his achievements, Édouard Vuillard lived a generally withdrawn life, living with his mother until her death in 1928.
Connections
Édouard Vuillard remained a bachelor throughout his life, although he evidently enjoyed the company of women and had several close female friends. Lucy Hessel, his "dragon" as his mother referred to her, played a particularly influential role in his life.
Mother:
Marie Vuillard (Michaud)
Friend:
Lucy Hessel
References
Edouard Vuillard
In a series of illustrated essays and catalogue entries, the authors explore Vuillard's complex and diverse artistic development, beginning with his academic training in Paris in the late 1880s and the innovative Nabi paintings of the 1890s for which he is best known, including his provocative, disquieting middle-class interiors and his work associated with the avant-garde theatre. The authors also examine Vuillard's splendid but lesser known large-scale decorations, his luminous landscapes, and the elegant portraits from the last decades of his career. In addition to paintings, the volume includes a substantial selection of drawings and graphics, together with a large group of striking photographs by the artist, many of which are published here for the first time.
2003
Édouard Vuillard & Ker-Xavier Roussel: Private Moments in the Open Air: Landscapes (1890–1944)
The French painters Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) and Ker-Xavier Roussel (1867–1944) had a singular relationship, sharing similar artistic trajectories and interests in careers that bridged the 19th and 20th centuries. This new volume examines the theme of the landscape in the oeuvres of the two painters, offering a new perspective on the evolution of European painting over the course of half a century.
2018
Edouard Vuillard: Painter-Decorator - Patrons and Projects, 1892-1912
In this lavishly illustrated study of Vuillard as decorator, Gloria Groom examines the two earliest decades of his career, a period when he produced fifty daring and important large-scale paintings as decoration. Groom discusses these early works and recreates and re-evaluates their original context, providing valuable new information about Vuillard's career, a fresh perspective on his thinking about art, and an entertaining social history of fin-de-siecle Paris.
Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940
This beautifully illustrated book examines the master artist's work in the context of a unique circle of friends and patrons between the turn of the 20th century and World War II. Essays by leading scholars explore the artist's relationship with key members of this glamorous social circle, as well as the connections between Vuillard and Proust, two of the world's great observers of a world now lost.
2012
Edouard Vuillard: Catalogue Raisonne
This catalogue raisonné of the paintings and pastels of Édouard Vuillard provides an extraordinary opportunity to look again more carefully and above all, comprehensively. Hundreds of photographs taken by Vuillard himself, together with an unprecedented collection of preparatory drawings and sketches, focus more closely on the artist's creative process than has any previous study. These three voumes present a compelling re-examination of Vuillard's work and recommends itself to experts and art lovers alike.