EDOUARD VUILLARD (1868-1940) Madame Vuillard in... Lot 12

EDOUARD VUILLARD (1868-1940) Madame Vuillard in red bathrobe bears the artist's signature stamp 'E Vuillard' (lower right) oil on canvas Painted circa 1911 stamped with the artist's signature 'E Vuillard' (lower right) oil on canvas Painted circa 1911 66.7 x 55.8 cm. 26 1/4 x 21 15/16 in. Footnotes: Provenance Artist's studio. Charles-Auguste Girard Collection, Paris. Private collection, Paris. Bibliography A. Salomon & G. Cogeval, Vuillard, The Inexhaustible Glance, Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, Vol. II, Paris, 2003, no. IX-39, (illustrated p. 1049). Édouard Vuillard is famous for his intimate paintings of domestic interiors inhabited by his family and close friends. In the present painting, Madame Vuillard in red bathrobe, Vuillard returns to his favorite subject, that of his mother. Vuillard never married, and remained close to his mother until her death in 1928. It was through his many portraits that he was able to refine and develop his formal style, both during his period of allegiance to the revolutionary Nabis group and thereafter. Painted around 1911, Madame Vuillard en peignoir rouge is situated in the middle of Vuillard's career, at a time when he was enjoying both critical and commercial success. Many contemporary commentators have remarked that Vuillard was fortunate to be able to choose the works he liked without having to accept expensive commissions. His colleague Walter Sickert even said he envied Vuillard's "freedom". In 1908, Vuillard settled permanently with his mother in Clichy, northwest of Paris. It was a neighborhood he knew well, and he was delighted with the airy apartment that afforded him a bird's-eye view of Place Ventimiglia (today Place Adolphe-Max). Freed from financial constraints, Vuillard was free to paint the subjects he preferred and, as is often the case, he turned to those closest to him. The present painting follows in the footsteps of his earlier Nabis paintings, where, unlike the other members of the Nabis group who preferred esoteric subjects to communicate their synthesist visions, Vuillard turned to domestic, even mundane observations to reveal mysteries and latent feelings. In his diary in 1893, Vuillard posed the rhetorical question: 'Why is it in familiar places that the mind and sensibility find the greatest degree of authentic novelty?' (E. Vuillard quoted in B. Thomson, Vuillard, Oxford, 1988, p. 44). Seated in a yellow and green armchair, Madame Vuillard is depicted here in the cluttered Clichy apartment, surrounded by an oriental rug, patterned textiles and richly upholstered furniture so typical of the bourgeois salons of the French Third Republic. Despite her central position, little attention is paid to Madame Vuillard's physiognomy, and she is depicted without detail by the same energetic brushstrokes that Vuillard employs throughout the composition. This formal simplification was in keeping with the philosophy of the Nabis, who sought to represent a symbolic distillation of experience. As a result, a faithful representation of the subject was eliminated in order to increase the composition's emotional impact. As Vuillard explains, 'a woman's head has just produced a certain emotion in me, I must use this emotion alone and I must not try to remember the nose or the ear, they are of no importance' (E. Vuillard quoted by B. Thomson, ibid, p. 28). In Madame Vuillard en peignoir rouge, Vuillard subordinates the figure of his mother, emphasizing line, pattern and color. The resulting effect unifies the disparate elements of the scene and brings them together in a single plane, giving the whole composition a rich, tapestry-like texture. Famed as a colorist, Vuillard's palette in this work is distinguished by its boldness and inventiveness. The carmine and bright pink of Madame Vuillard's dressing gown are echoed in the burgundy of the trunk, as are the swirling lilacs and mauves of the carpet and striped tablecloth. Vuillard counterbalances these warm tones with flashes of cooler pigments. The citrus yellow of the armchair and the emerald cushions of the chair by the fireplace match the tapestry of the large square-backed chair in the foreground, whose black, ripping contours recall the cloisonnism favored by the Nabis. As the contemporary critic André Gide observed, '[Vuillard] never brings a color to the fore without excusing it with subtle, precious repetition' (A. Gide quoted in B. Thomson, op. cit., p. 72). If the disruption of pictorial space and the deliberate blurring