Édouard Vuillard was a French painter, born in Cuiseaux in 1868, who died in 1940. He spent his career painting the rooms around him: his mother's dressmaking workshop, patterned wallpaper, lamplight. A member of the Nabis from 1889, he also took almost two thousand snapshots with a Kodak, and for about forty years he was the lover of his dealer's wife.
People who type his name usually expect a shy man who painted his mother's sewing room. He was that, and a good deal more.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
The legend is tidy. Vuillard lived with his widowed mother until she died in 1928, when he was sixty, and he painted what he saw from her table: seamstresses bent over cloth, walls covered in pattern, a lamp. Critics called him an intimist, and the word began to sound like a verdict on his character.
Then there is the other half of his life. In 1900 he met Lucy Hessel, the wife of Jos Hessel, a partner in the gallery that sold his paintings. She became his model, his confidante and his lover, and she remained all three for about forty years.
He summered with the couple, holidayed at their château, and left Paris with them in 1940. The painter of his mother's rooms had a second home, and it belonged to his dealer.
What You'll Discover
Whose sewing room became his studio.
What the young prophets believed.
Why people vanish into his walls.
What the camera was really for.
Who the dealer's wife really was.