Vuillard, Édouard


Vuillard, Édouard

(ādwär` vüēyär`), 1868–1940, French painter and lithographer; a member of the NabisNabis
[Heb.,=prophets], a group of artists in France active during the 1890s. Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis were the principal theorists of the group. Outstanding members were Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Aristide Maillol, Félix Vallotton, and the
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. He is known for his scenes of Montmartre and especially for domestic interiors that evoke the quiet intimacy of home life. Such paintings as Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) have a brooding tension that was supplanted by works in a lighter, more decorative vein after 1900.

Bibliography

See biographies by S. Preston (1985) and B. Thomson (1988).

Vuillard, Edouard

 

Born Nov. 11, 1868, in Cuiseaux, Burgundy; died June 21, 1940, in La Baule, Brittany. French painter.

From 1886, Vuillard studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Julian Academy in Paris. In about 1890 he became a member of the Nabis group, which developed the decorative trends of late impressionism. He was influenced by P. Gauguin, H. Toulouse-Lautrec, and Japanese prints. Vuil-lard was an intimist artist. He painted intimate genre pictures of everyday life, as well as portraits, landscapes, and still lifes and created decorative panels, lithographs, and illustrations. Vuillard’s art, consisting of variations on a narrow range of subjects, is attractive in the fresh directness of its approach to daily life, the artist’s subtle emotions, the colorful and rhythmic expressiveness of silhouettes, and the exquisite harmony of opaque, vibrant colors, mainly composed of related transitional shades (In Bed, 1891, National Museum of Modern Art, Paris; In the Room, 1893, the Hermitage, Leningrad).

REFERENCE

Ritchie, A. C. Edouard Vuillard. New York, 1954.