Footnotes

Provenance
Dr. & Mme. Antonin Gosset, Paris (the sitter's parents, acquired directly from the artist).
Private collection.
Anon. sale, Drouot, Paris, 15 March 2008, lot 47.
Private collection, Portugal (acquired at the above sale).
Thence by descent to the present owners.

Exhibited
Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Édouard Vuillard, Exposition, 15 – 27 April 1912, no. 14 (titled Portrait d'enfant).
Paris, Manzi-Joyant, Exposition d'art moderne, 1912, no. 204.
Basel, Kunsthalle, Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), 26 March – 1 May 1949, no. 214.
New York, The Museum of Modern Art & Cleveland Museum of Art, Vuillard, 6 April – 6 June 1954.

Literature
A. Salomon & G. Cogeval, Vuillard, The Inexhaustible Glance, Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, Vol. II, Paris, 2003, no. IX-166 (illustrated p. 1116).

The present work shows the diminutive figure of a child eating his lunch in the tranquil surroundings of a summer garden. Seated on a yellow wicker chair too large for him, little Jean Gosset undertakes his meal with an air of serious concentration. Vuillard painted the composition in Normandy, where he spent each summer with his friends Jos and Lucy Hessel. According to the artist's journal at the time, he worked on this painting for five days between 12-17 September 1911. Annette Vailliant, the daughter of an actress whose friends included artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir, recalled the sitting clearly: 'A much happier child, of the same age as my sister Denise, Jean Gosset was the son of the well-known and highly fashionable surgeon. Dr. Gosset had installed his wife and child in a nearby villa, and there Vuillard started on his lovely portrait of the little boy in a pink jersey sailor-suit, with his little hat pushed back over his blond curls. He was taking a snack out in the sun, drinking from a large white cup. Jean Gosset was shy and terrified of my sister, who was fiendishly bossy with him' (A. Salomon & G. Cogeval, Vuillard, The Inexhaustible Glance, Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, Paris, 2003, Vol. II, p. 1117).

Portraiture formed a key theme for Vuillard throughout his career and remained a focus through his earlier association with the Nabi brotherhood. A short-lived movement, Vuillard joined in 1889 and, together with Sérusier, Denis, Bonnard and Ranson, he admired the work of Gauguin in particular, whose use of pure colour and pattern created a flat pictorial surface. However, Vuillard eschewed his associates' mystical subjects in favour of depicting his everyday world and that of the three women he lived with at the time – his mother, sister Marie and grandmother Michaud. A master of domestic interiors, some of Vuillard's most acclaimed paintings depict his family and close friends, of whom several became patrons: 'Vuillard may be seen as the heir of Degas, Gauguin and the Impressionists. He was also an artist of his time and, more precisely, the artist of a particular social milieu and moment... Rarely has an artist so completely entered the circle of his patrons' (S. Brown, Edouard Vuillard, A Painter and his muses, 1890-1940, New Haven, 2021, p. 33).

Although the subject is seated by himself, Le déjeuner du petit Jean Gosset en Normandie recalls some of the artist's compositions of 1900-1901 of his young niece Annette Roussel. In both Mother and child (1900) and Woman feeding a child (1901), the same tension is seen between the small child and their formal, adult surroundings, emphasising the vulnerability of the subject. Whilst Annette is almost subsumed by her patterned clothes and surroundings in the latter painting however, Jean Gosset was painted at a point when Vuillard returned to a more realistic style, seeking to explore the more naturalistic play of light. A Nabi influence can certainly be felt however in the bold tablecloth whose chequered pattern is joyfully brought to life by scurrying dashes of red.

The present work has also lost the emphasis on the flattened picture surface present in Vuillard's turn of the century compositions. A depth of space is created by pushing the table at a diagonal, bringing the viewer into the composition. The apparent informality with which the scene has been captured, with the chair and table cut off, recalls the spontaneity of photography which Vuillard had started experimenting with after the purchase of his first Kodak camera in 1897. This hobby reflected his constant concern with composition. He took numerous shots of his family and friends, and at his death he left behind almost two thousand photographs which captured familiar domestic scenes. Indeed, a photograph taken by Vuillard during his summer sojourn of 1911 shows the exact view of the garden, table and chair where Jean Gosset would sit for his portrait.