Footnotes

Provenance
The artist's studio.
Charles-Auguste Girard Collection, Paris.
Private collection, France.

Literature
A. Salomon & G. Cogeval, Vuillard, The Inexhaustible Glance, Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, Vol. II, Paris, 2003, no. IX-39 (illustrated p. 1049).

Édouard Vuillard is celebrated for his Intimist paintings of domestic interiors inhabited by his family and those of his inner circle. In the present painting, Madame Vuillard en peignoir rouge, Vuillard returned to arguably his most favoured subject, that of his mother. Vuillard never married and remained close to his mother until her death in 1928. She was a figure to whom Vuillard returned to paint throughout his career and it was through her many portrayals that he was able to hone and develop his formal style, both during his allegiance to the ground-breaking Nabis group and beyond.

Painted circa 1911, Madame Vuillard en peignoir rouge issues from Vuillard's mid-career, a moment when he was enjoying both critical and commercial success. Many contemporary commentators observed Vuillard's fortunate position in being able to select the work that he enjoyed without the necessity to take on onerous commissions. Indeed, fellow painter Walter Sickert even confided that he envied Vuillard's 'liberty'. In 1908 Vuillard had settled permanently with his mother in Clichy, northwestern Paris. It was a district that he knew well, and he was delighted with the airy apartment which offered him a bird's eye view of Place Vintimille (now Place Adolphe-Max).

Unburdened by financial constraints, Vuillard was free to paint his preferred subjects and, as so often, he turned to those closest to him. The present painting continues the subject matter of his earlier Nabis paintings, where, in contrast to other members of the Nabis group who preferred esoteric subjects to communicate their Synthetist visions, Vuillard turned to domestic, even mundane observations to reveal latent mystery and sentiment. Writing in his journal in 1893, Vuillard posed the rhetorical question: 'Why is it in the familiar places that the mind and sensibility find the greatest degree of genuine novelty?' (E. Vuillard quoted in B. Thomson, Vuillard, Oxford, 1988, p. 44).

Seated in a yellow and green armchair, Madame Vuillard is depicted here within the cluttered Clichy apartment, surrounded by the oriental rug, patterned textiles, and richly upholstered furniture so typical of the bourgeois salons of France's Third Republic. Despite her central positioning, little attention is given to Madame Vuillard's physiognomy, and she is depicted without detail by the same energized brushwork that Vuillard employs throughout the composition. This formal simplification was in accordance with the Nabis' philosophy, which sought to represent a symbolic distillation of experience. Consequently, a faithful representation of the subject was suppressed to heighten the emotional import of the composition. As Vuillard explained, 'a woman's head just produced in me a certain emotion, I must make use of this emotion alone and I must not try to remember the nose or the ear, they're of no importance' (E. Vuillard quoted in B. Thomson, ibid, p. 28).

In Madame Vuillard en peignoir rouge, Vuillard subordinates the figure of his mother and foregrounds an emphasis on line, pattern and colour. The resulting effect serves to unify the disparate elements of the scene and pull them together into one plane, lending the whole composition a rich, tapestry-like texture. Famed as a colourist, Vuillard's palette in the present work is notable for its boldness and inventiveness. The carmine and hot pinks of Madame Vuillard's housecoat are echoed in the burgundy of the chest, as well as the swirling lilacs and mauves to the carpet and striped tablecloth. Meanwhile, Vuillard offsets these warm tones with flashes of cooler pigments. The citrus yellow of the armchair and emerald cushions of the chair next to the fireplace chime in the upholstery of the large square-backed chair to the foreground, whose jarring black contours are so reminiscent of Cloisonnism favoured by the Nabis. As contemporary critic André Gide observed '[Vuillard] never puts forward one colour without excusing it with subtle and precious repetition' (A. Gide quoted in B. Thomson, op. cit., p. 72).

While disruption of the picture space and a deliberate blurring of the boundaries between background and foreground firmly looks back to Vuillard's involvement with the Nabis and their predilection for flat, two-dimensional art, Vuillard's embracing rather than reductive view of the subject marks a development from his more austere compositions of the 1890s. In the present work he takes care to denote small details of the room, from the herringbone diagonals of the parquet flooring to the fall of light on the cloth atop the nesting table or the satin lustre of the lemon armchair - considered observations which can be attributed to Vuillard's use of photography as an aide-mémoire to guide his later compositions.

It is very likely that Vuillard acquired his first Kodak box in 1897. Thereafter, he became an avid champion of photography and used it enthusiastically to assist and influence his creative process. Vuillard had no interest in posed subjects or picturesque views but rather used the medium to make photographic records as tools to enable him to better understand his subject. In the present work, the documentation of detail alongside the abrupt cropping of the armchair to the lower right and alert posture of Madame Vuillard, poised as if to stand, suggests a moment of captured stasis and that Vuillard may have worked directly from a photographic source.

Vuillard remained committed to genre subjects and particularly depictions of domesticity throughout his career, even at a time when the prevailing avant-garde, notably the Fauves, began to experiment with idyllic and Arcadian themes. Madame Vuillard en peignoir rouge is testament to the enduring fascination that Vuillard held for these quotidian, intimate spaces where, by returning to those most familiar to him, he was able to fully explore the formal potential of his compositions: 'In Vuillard's paintings the same models are featured again and again: children grow up and leave home, Lucy Hessel's hair turns grey, memories are evoked as one era succeeds another' (B. Thomson, op. cit., p. 110).