GENERAL DESCRIPTION
The paintings that are the subject of this essay cover a period of less than ten years in Edouard Vuillard’s career and demonstrate a fascination, common to much of his work, with observing people in rooms. His paintings give consistent and reliable information about his life and those of his close circle. Vuillard’s earliest works almost all deal with his immediate family, in particular his mother, with whom he lived, and his sister Marie, who married Vuillard's close friend and fellow artist, Ker-Xavier Roussel.
In The Little Restaurant (c.1900-1901), we are presented with people in a room that is also a public space: a sizable dining room, with its row upon row of identical marble-topped tables and regularly spaced tall windows. It should be read as a daytime scene since the regular shafts of light mark windows punctuating the back wall. Vuillard focuses our attention on the young family at the second table, a woman in tartan dress with her back to us, a man in a dark jacket and a bowler hat, and two children, one on the woman’s knee, the other in blue facing us from across the table. Given the simplicity of the restaurant, no tablecloths, simple wooden chairs, this establishment was in all likelihood a popular eating house offering a prix-fixe menu. There were many such establishments in Paris, particularly around the boulevards of the Right Bank, in the 1890s. [1] They had a regular turnover of clientele, with several sittings for lunch and dinner. So it is in the sense of its modesty rather than capacity that one should understand the title Le petit restaurant, which is original to Vuillard’s day.
This family—with its little dog, tail aquiver, standing expectantly on the right—can, I believe, be identified as that of Cipa Godebski, the younger half brother of Misia Natanson. Cipa, a musician and composer, is seen here with his wife, Ida, or more likely, with his sister, Misia, and his two children, Mimi and Jean, an identification supported by a comparison of the man’s facial features with a number of other portraits of Cipa. Vuillard was obviously fond of this young man, who seems to have slept a lot (three of Vuillard’s portraits show him in bed) and was inseparable from his soft black trilby hat. With this identification, the previously assumed date, 1897, is clearly too early for this painting: Mimi was not born until 1899 and Jean a year or so later. [2] Even the little dog is identifiable. From various photographs taken by Vuillard and by Alfred Natanson of Misia at Le Relais, Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, it is possible to identify the dog in the Dallas picture with hers. Equally characteristic is her style of dress, a plaid-patterned smock with a white lace collar and leg-of-mutton sleeves. Vuillard’s photography, resulting in album upon album of small, square, black-and-white snaps, began in earnest in the later 1890s, when he acquired a Kodak box camera, and it offers the historian a convenient documentation of his relations with the Natansons at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne.
In order to situate the second painting, The First Steps (1900-1901), chronologically, one needs to look back at certain earlier paintings Vuillard made of the Roussels, his sister and brother-in-law’s family. In 1894 Vuillard’s sister, Marie, married his friend and fellow Nabi. Vuillard played a not inconsiderable role in making this match and may have sensed a certain weight of responsibility given the troubles that soon beset the marriage. After the loss of their first-born son in infancy, the birth of Annette in November 1898 brought immense delight. It is Annette who takes center stage in the piece. The setting is the apartment Vuillard shared with his mother in the rue Truffaut, just north of the boulevard des Batignolles in Montmartre. The title is unlikely to have been his own — indeed it smacks of a sentimentalizing impulse on the part of an early owner and is slightly misleading since these do not look like the child’s very first steps. [3]
The usual identification of the woman in this painting with the child’s mother also seems wrong: I am convinced it is once again her grandmother Madame Vuillard, who is watching the toddler. [4] From 1899 the Roussel family lived just outside Paris at L’Étang-la-Ville, near Versailles. When Vuillard’s sister, Marie, wanted to run errands in the city, it was clearly convenient to leave the child with her own mother in Montmartre, hence the frequent presence of Annette in Vuillard’s turn-of-the-century paintings, tottering around the artist’s studio, a highly unsuitable but intriguing play area.
The room depicted was the main room in the rue Truffaut apartment, which was entered, from a small vestibule, through the double doors to be seen in The First Steps and served as a salon-cum-studio. We see how cluttered it was with canvases and rolls of paper. It was a light room, much lighter than Vuillard had hitherto been used to, with two large French windows opening onto an expansive view. Marie’s relative height in relation to the double doors offers further proof that the figure with Annette in the Dallas painting is the diminutive grandmother, not the slightly taller mother. Both paintings are a delicate symphony of off-whites, drabs, and grays, here enlivened by the high note of coral.
Interior (c.1900-1901), the third painting from the Dallas collection to feature people in a room, represents an upstairs bedroom in the Roussels’ house in L’Étang-la-Ville. It offered a flavor of the countryside that Roussel exploited to the full in his own painting. Vuillard, too, would make the most of the views from those windows, in particular the delightful verdant view over a sloping garden toward the forested ridge of Saint-Cloud. In the painting, light spills into the room, reflecting off the half-open French window and hitting the floor, casting the two figures into contre-jour (backlighting) and projecting the shadow of the woman seated on the left. The artist observes the chance reflection of a picture in the mirror of the wardrobe and the different play of light on the three wallpapered surfaces to the right, the lower section of ceiling indicating a half landing perhaps. The figures have been identified as Annette’s two grandmothers, Madame Vuillard and Madame Roussel, and certainly Madame Vuillard’s back view, to the left of the composition, is unmistakable. Like The Little Restaurant, it has Vuillard’s preferred support of cardboard, which is left bare in many areas, establishing the overall warm tonality of the palette.
The latest and largest of Vuillard’s painted rooms is The Tent, painted in 1908. The painting, of a makeshift room supported by drunkenly leaning tent poles, captures the impression of a windswept and somewhat chaotic summer scene. Thanks to Vuillard’s habit of making detailed pencil sketches (1908) and taking photographs, we can reconstruct the subject with some precision. The so-called tent has not, as one might have imagined, been erected on a beach, but in the garden of the house glimpsed at the left, presumably to provide a sheltered and shaded place to sit. The setting is Le Pouliguen, a seaside resort in Brittany, which adjoins the popular resort of La Baule. The Natansons rented the house for the summer and stayed there with their two daughters (Denise appears in the painting) and nanny. The sizable property was big enough to accommodate their usual group of friends, Lucy and Jos Hessel, the Arons (Lucy Hessel’s sister, Marcelle, and her husband, Sam Aron), Tristan Bernard (a great friend of the late Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and lover of Marcelle Aron), and Romain Coolus, not to mention Vuillard, the semiofficial painter of the company. This rarefied, somewhat bohemian, house party represented the crossover between the worlds of Parisian art and theater: Marthe Mellot was an actress, Natanson, Bernard, and Coolus were all playwrights. The group took joint holidays but rarely visited the same place or rented the same property twice, and much time was spent over long meals in the garden. We know this because Vuillard was there, ever the astute observer.
Ever the bachelor and peripatetic vacationer at the mercy of his friends’ whims, Vuillard conveys the implicit uncertainties of his own social position in The Tent, whose charm lies in its provisional, chaotic appearance: a member of the petit bourgeois class, Vuillard was an outsider looking in on this world of the stage and new money. What is striking about this image is its paper support, now a brownish color, and daringly slapdash technique involving a broad brush and distemper. A large area of the foreground is indicated with the merest slashes of arabesque paint, leaving much of the support untouched. Several views of Le Pouliguen painted that same summer show the same basic palette, paper support, and broad handling, and one senses that Vuillard found a new freedom on these occasions. Sadly, the next time Vuillard was to go to La Baule was in June 1940, when he had already suffered a series of heart attacks. With his friend Lucy Hessel, he was caught up in the mass exodus from Paris following the German invasion and the French armistice. It is often said that the shock of these tragic events was the final straw for Vuillard, and he died in La Baule, aged seventy-two.
[1] The Grand Restaurant Universel in the boulevard des Italiens, for instance, offered breakfast at a fixed price of two francs; Karl Baedeker, Paris and Environs: Handbook for Travellers, 1900, 16.
[2] In 1910, Maurice Ravel dedicated his delightful piano suite Ma mère l’Oye to Mimi and Jean Godebski, who were raised in an exceptionally musical household.
[3] Vuillard’s titles were almost always nonspecific, usually no more than a generic Interior.
[4] His sister, Marie Roussel, is the woman identified in Salomon and Cogeval 2003 and in the records of the Dallas Museum of Art.
Adapted from
Belinda Thompson, "People in Rooms: Four Paintings by Eduard Vuillard," in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism at the Dallas Museum of Art, ed. Heather MacDonald (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 144-156.
NOTES
Transcription not on Piction, not available to link for online content.
This note was previously tagged #routed (and possibly !Routed_Feb15). I am removing those tags and replacing with #draft so that this note proceeds to GDocs for routing and is harvested to Brain. (EAS, 12/26/2016)
Removed text because required illustration- The house, Ker Panurge, is shown in a postcard of the time, and we can see how imposing it was.
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Belinda Thomson, "Edouard Vuillard: Exploring the Limits of Intimism," lecture April 1, 2010, Dallas Museum of Art. Transcribed. (Lecture was one of two delivered on the same evening. Dr. Thomson gave her presentation first.)
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General Description
The paintings that are the subject of this essay cover a period of less than ten years in Edouard Vuillard’s career and demonstrate a fascination, common to much of his work, with observing people in rooms. His paintings give consistent and reliable information about his life and those of his close circle. Vuillard’s earliest works almost all deal with his immediate family, in particular his mother, with whom he lived, and his sister Marie, who married Vuillard's close friend and fellow artist, Ker-Xavier Roussel.
In The Little Restaurant (c.1900-1901), we are presented with people in a room that is also a public space: a sizable dining room, with its row upon row of identical marble-topped tables and regularly spaced tall windows. It should be read as a daytime scene since the regular shafts of light mark windows punctuating the back wall. Vuillard focuses our attention on the young family at the second table, a woman in tartan dress with her back to us, a man in a dark jacket and a bowler hat, and two children, one on the woman’s knee, the other in blue facing us from across the table. Given the simplicity of the restaurant, no tablecloths, simple wooden chairs, this establishment was in all likelihood a popular eating house offering a prix-fixe menu. There were many such establishments in Paris, particularly around the boulevards of the Right Bank, in the 1890s. [1] They had a regular turnover of clientele, with several sittings for lunch and dinner. So it is in the sense of its modesty rather than capacity that one should understand the title Le petit restaurant, which is original to Vuillard’s day.
This family—with its little dog, tail aquiver, standing expectantly on the right—can, I believe, be identified as that of Cipa Godebski, the younger half brother of Misia Natanson. Cipa, a musician and composer, is seen here with his wife, Ida, or more likely, with his sister, Misia, and his two children, Mimi and Jean, an identification supported by a comparison of the man’s facial features with a number of other portraits of Cipa. Vuillard was obviously fond of this young man, who seems to have slept a lot (three of Vuillard’s portraits show him in bed) and was inseparable from his soft black trilby hat. With this identification, the previously assumed date, 1897, is clearly too early for this painting: Mimi was not born until 1899 and Jean a year or so later. [2] Even the little dog is identifiable. From various photographs taken by Vuillard and by Alfred Natanson of Misia at Le Relais, Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, it is possible to identify the dog in the Dallas picture with hers. Equally characteristic is her style of dress, a plaid-patterned smock with a white lace collar and leg-of-mutton sleeves. Vuillard’s photography, resulting in album upon album of small, square, black-and-white snaps, began in earnest in the later 1890s, when he acquired a Kodak box camera, and it offers the historian a convenient documentation of his relations with the Natansons at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne.
In order to situate the second painting, The First Steps (1900-1901), chronologically, one needs to look back at certain earlier paintings Vuillard made of the Roussels, his sister and brother-in-law’s family. In 1894 Vuillard’s sister, Marie, married his friend and fellow Nabi. Vuillard played a not inconsiderable role in making this match and may have sensed a certain weight of responsibility given the troubles that soon beset the marriage. After the loss of their first-born son in infancy, the birth of Annette in November 1898 brought immense delight. It is Annette who takes center stage in the piece. The setting is the apartment Vuillard shared with his mother in the rue Truffaut, just north of the boulevard des Batignolles in Montmartre. The title is unlikely to have been his own — indeed it smacks of a sentimentalizing impulse on the part of an early owner and is slightly misleading since these do not look like the child’s very first steps. [3]
The usual identification of the woman in this painting with the child’s mother also seems wrong: I am convinced it is once again her grandmother Madame Vuillard, who is watching the toddler. [4] From 1899 the Roussel family lived just outside Paris at L’Étang-la-Ville, near Versailles. When Vuillard’s sister, Marie, wanted to run errands in the city, it was clearly convenient to leave the child with her own mother in Montmartre, hence the frequent presence of Annette in Vuillard’s turn-of-the-century paintings, tottering around the artist’s studio, a highly unsuitable but intriguing play area.
The room depicted was the main room in the rue Truffaut apartment, which was entered, from a small vestibule, through the double doors to be seen in The First Steps and served as a salon-cum-studio. We see how cluttered it was with canvases and rolls of paper. It was a light room, much lighter than Vuillard had hitherto been used to, with two large French windows opening onto an expansive view. Marie’s relative height in relation to the double doors offers further proof that the figure with Annette in the Dallas painting is the diminutive grandmother, not the slightly taller mother. Both paintings are a delicate symphony of off-whites, drabs, and grays, here enlivened by the high note of coral.
Interior (c.1900-1901), the third painting from the Dallas collection to feature people in a room, represents an upstairs bedroom in the Roussels’ house in L’Étang-la-Ville. It offered a flavor of the countryside that Roussel exploited to the full in his own painting. Vuillard, too, would make the most of the views from those windows, in particular the delightful verdant view over a sloping garden toward the forested ridge of Saint-Cloud. In the painting, light spills into the room, reflecting off the half-open French window and hitting the floor, casting the two figures into contre-jour (backlighting) and projecting the shadow of the woman seated on the left. The artist observes the chance reflection of a picture in the mirror of the wardrobe and the different play of light on the three wallpapered surfaces to the right, the lower section of ceiling indicating a half landing perhaps. The figures have been identified as Annette’s two grandmothers, Madame Vuillard and Madame Roussel, and certainly Madame Vuillard’s back view, to the left of the composition, is unmistakable. Like The Little Restaurant, it has Vuillard’s preferred support of cardboard, which is left bare in many areas, establishing the overall warm tonality of the palette.
The latest and largest of Vuillard’s painted rooms is The Tent, painted in 1908. The painting, of a makeshift room supported by drunkenly leaning tent poles, captures the impression of a windswept and somewhat chaotic summer scene. Thanks to Vuillard’s habit of making detailed pencil sketches (1908) and taking photographs, we can reconstruct the subject with some precision. The so-called tent has not, as one might have imagined, been erected on a beach, but in the garden of the house glimpsed at the left, presumably to provide a sheltered and shaded place to sit. The setting is Le Pouliguen, a seaside resort in Brittany, which adjoins the popular resort of La Baule. The Natansons rented the house for the summer and stayed there with their two daughters (Denise appears in the painting) and nanny. The sizable property was big enough to accommodate their usual group of friends, Lucy and Jos Hessel, the Arons (Lucy Hessel’s sister, Marcelle, and her husband, Sam Aron), Tristan Bernard (a great friend of the late Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and lover of Marcelle Aron), and Romain Coolus, not to mention Vuillard, the semiofficial painter of the company. This rarefied, somewhat bohemian, house party represented the crossover between the worlds of Parisian art and theater: Marthe Mellot was an actress, Natanson, Bernard, and Coolus were all playwrights. The group took joint holidays but rarely visited the same place or rented the same property twice, and much time was spent over long meals in the garden. We know this because Vuillard was there, ever the astute observer.
Ever the bachelor and peripatetic vacationer at the mercy of his friends’ whims, Vuillard conveys the implicit uncertainties of his own social position in The Tent, whose charm lies in its provisional, chaotic appearance: a member of the petit bourgeois class, Vuillard was an outsider looking in on this world of the stage and new money. What is striking about this image is its paper support, now a brownish color, and daringly slapdash technique involving a broad brush and distemper. A large area of the foreground is indicated with the merest slashes of arabesque paint, leaving much of the support untouched. Several views of Le Pouliguen painted that same summer show the same basic palette, paper support, and broad handling, and one senses that Vuillard found a new freedom on these occasions. Sadly, the next time Vuillard was to go to La Baule was in June 1940, when he had already suffered a series of heart attacks. With his friend Lucy Hessel, he was caught up in the mass exodus from Paris following the German invasion and the French armistice. It is often said that the shock of these tragic events was the final straw for Vuillard, and he died in La Baule, aged seventy-two.
[1] The Grand Restaurant Universel in the boulevard des Italiens, for instance, offered breakfast at a fixed price of two francs; Karl Baedeker, Paris and Environs: Handbook for Travellers, 1900, 16.
[2] In 1910, Maurice Ravel dedicated his delightful piano suite Ma mère l’Oye to Mimi and Jean Godebski, who were raised in an exceptionally musical household.
[3] Vuillard’s titles were almost always nonspecific, usually no more than a generic Interior.
[4] His sister, Marie Roussel, is the woman identified in Salomon and Cogeval 2003 and in the records of the Dallas Museum of Art.
Adapted from
Belinda Thompson, "People in Rooms: Four Paintings by Eduard Vuillard," in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism at the Dallas Museum of Art, ed. Heather MacDonald (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 144-156.
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Transcription not on Piction, not available to link for online content.
This note was previously tagged #routed (and possibly !Routed_Feb15). I am removing those tags and replacing with #draft so that this note proceeds to GDocs for routing and is harvested to Brain. (EAS, 12/26/2016)
Removed text because required illustration- The house, Ker Panurge, is shown in a postcard of the time, and we can see how imposing it was.
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