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Lot Essay
Intimate portrayals of home and family life occupied Edouard Vuillard throughout his career, but it is his work dating from the final decade of the nineteenth century for which he is best known. In 1878, shortly after the Vuillard family moved to Paris from their provincial home in Cuiseaux, the artist's mother, Marie Justine Vuillard, purchased a corset-making business. The new family home doubled both as residence and atelier, with the dining room serving as her workplace. Mme Vuillard's daughter Marie assisted her, and she employed two apprentices. Until his mother retired in 1898, the daily activities of the atelier provided the artist with a wealth of subject matter.
Madame Vuillard cousant dates from the period in which Vuillard was affiliated with the Nabi circle, and it was during this decade that he produced some of his most original and sophisticated work. Intricately patterned and rendered in subtle tonal harmonies, the series of seamstress paintings that Vuillard produced during the 1890s are among the finest and most innovative expressions of the Nabi aesthetic. Elizabeth Easton has written:
"The paintings of women sewing stand out in Vuillard's oeuvre for their decorative beauty, their complex construction, and their sense of intimacy. The sewing paintings are icons of the inwardness that informed Vuillard's personal approach to Symbolism. Objects do not stand for specific otherworldly concepts in these paintings but through tightly woven space dominated by busy patterns they evoke a feeling of intimacy. Pattern is the unifying visual characteristic of these compositions, as might befit a body of work that has as its subject the working of cloth. Similarly, figures themselves--as flat, dark, and solid silhouettes--become decorative motifs. These pictures also serve as metaphors for Vuillard's concept of himself as a painter. In depicting women conjoined with their surroundings much like the patterns of the objects they sew, Vuillard in some way reflects the union between the artist and the work he creates" (in The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1990, p. 55).
Frequently small in scale, these intimate domestic scenes examine the complex relationships between family and friends in the Vuillard household, with Mme Vuillard as the presiding matriarch and muse. The present work depicts Mme Vuillard seated in the immediate left foreground of the work, an unusual and unconventional position for a solitary figure in a composition. Vuillard counterbalanced her presence with an arrangement of wall planes behind her. Her features are only faintly defined while her black and red patterned blouse and white apron stand out in contrast to the neutrally colored background. She sits absorbed in her work, delicately examining a piece of appliqué. Here Vuillard has created a novel and fascinating perspective, simultaneously presenting the illusion of receding distance and flattened space.
The quiet and serene mystery of this scene evokes the paintings of Johannes Vermeer (fig. 1), whose work Vuillard studied when visiting the Louvre during his student days at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. An entry in Vuillard's journal dated November 1888 includes a drawing of a painting by Vermeer and also several sketches of domestic scenes of women working around a table, which prefigure his engagement with this theme in the coming decade.
(fig. 1) Jan Vermeer, La Dentellière, 1665. Le Musée du Louvre, Paris.
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Madame Vuillard cousant dates from the period in which Vuillard was affiliated with the Nabi circle, and it was during this decade that he produced some of his most original and sophisticated work. Intricately patterned and rendered in subtle tonal harmonies, the series of seamstress paintings that Vuillard produced during the 1890s are among the finest and most innovative expressions of the Nabi aesthetic. Elizabeth Easton has written:
"The paintings of women sewing stand out in Vuillard's oeuvre for their decorative beauty, their complex construction, and their sense of intimacy. The sewing paintings are icons of the inwardness that informed Vuillard's personal approach to Symbolism. Objects do not stand for specific otherworldly concepts in these paintings but through tightly woven space dominated by busy patterns they evoke a feeling of intimacy. Pattern is the unifying visual characteristic of these compositions, as might befit a body of work that has as its subject the working of cloth. Similarly, figures themselves--as flat, dark, and solid silhouettes--become decorative motifs. These pictures also serve as metaphors for Vuillard's concept of himself as a painter. In depicting women conjoined with their surroundings much like the patterns of the objects they sew, Vuillard in some way reflects the union between the artist and the work he creates" (in The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1990, p. 55).
Frequently small in scale, these intimate domestic scenes examine the complex relationships between family and friends in the Vuillard household, with Mme Vuillard as the presiding matriarch and muse. The present work depicts Mme Vuillard seated in the immediate left foreground of the work, an unusual and unconventional position for a solitary figure in a composition. Vuillard counterbalanced her presence with an arrangement of wall planes behind her. Her features are only faintly defined while her black and red patterned blouse and white apron stand out in contrast to the neutrally colored background. She sits absorbed in her work, delicately examining a piece of appliqué. Here Vuillard has created a novel and fascinating perspective, simultaneously presenting the illusion of receding distance and flattened space.
The quiet and serene mystery of this scene evokes the paintings of Johannes Vermeer (fig. 1), whose work Vuillard studied when visiting the Louvre during his student days at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. An entry in Vuillard's journal dated November 1888 includes a drawing of a painting by Vermeer and also several sketches of domestic scenes of women working around a table, which prefigure his engagement with this theme in the coming decade.
(fig. 1) Jan Vermeer, La Dentellière, 1665. Le Musée du Louvre, Paris.
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