Edouard Vuillard: The Complete Story
Edouard Vuillard was the quiet poet of the patterned room. A member of the Nabis alongside Bonnard, he painted small, hushed interiors where figures almost vanish into wallpaper, rugs and fabric.
His subject was the everyday life of his own family, above all his mother, watched with tenderness and a strange, dreamy calm.
He lived with his mother for most of his life, and her dressmaking workshop fills his art with cloth.
Born: Cuiseaux, France, 1868
Known for: intimiste interiors, the Nabis, patterned domestic scenes
Died: La Baule, France, 1940
For anyone who wants more than a caption
Three that changed how I look at a picture:
The darker truth about Gauguin, the part of the Tahiti story that never makes the wall label
Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, what is actually on those scales
Inside Monet house at Giverny, room by room, including his own bedroom
Figures lost in pattern
Vuillard's interiors are crowded with pattern: striped wallpaper, flowered dresses, patterned carpets, all pressed flat against the surface.
A person can almost disappear into the decor, a head emerging from a field of dots. See what is post-impressionism.
It sounds like a trick, but it carries real feeling. The figures merged into their rooms suggest how much a home shapes and hides the people inside it.
The dressmaker mother
His widowed mother ran a corset and dressmaking business from the family apartment, and Vuillard grew up surrounded by bolts of fabric and women at work. That world of cloth and quiet labour became his deepest subject.
He painted her hundreds of times, sewing, pouring tea, sitting in lamplight. He called her, fondly, his muse, and lived at her side until she died.
The Nabi decorator
With the Nabis, Vuillard treated a painting as a flat decorated surface rather than a window. He often worked in distemper, pigment bound with glue, which dries to a soft, matte, fresco like finish ideal for large decorative panels.
See what is oil painting.
He also took thousands of photographs, snapshots of family life that fed the offhand, intimate framing of his painted rooms. See what is pastel.
The stage and the painted room
Vuillard worked closely with the experimental theatre of 1890s Paris, designing programmes and stage sets. The flat, patterned look of his paintings owes something to the painted backdrops of that stage.
He also made large decorative panels for the walls of wealthy friends, such as his Public Gardens series, turning a single room into a world of dappled light, children and trees. For Vuillard, painting could be furniture for the soul.
Common questions about Edouard Vuillard
What is Edouard Vuillard famous for?
Intimate, pattern filled interiors of family life, painted as a leading member of the Nabis.
Who did he paint most?
His mother, a dressmaker, whom he painted hundreds of times across his life.
What is distemper?
Pigment bound with glue that dries soft and matte, which he used for large decorative panels.
When did he die?
In 1940, in western France.
Why the hush still holds
Vuillard never chased drama, and for a while that made him seem minor beside louder modern painters. Look closely and his rooms are quietly radical, a whole world of feeling built from wallpaper and lamplight, the most intimate art of its age.
One last detail. As he grew older Vuillard turned to society portraits set in their owners crowded rooms, but the magic faded a little. His greatest work remains the small early interiors, made when the subject was simply home.