| Facts/Data
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Birth
1868 (Cuiseaux, France)
Death
1940 (La Baule, France)
Lived/Active
France
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Often Known For
interior, landscape, figure, portrait and genre painting
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 A post-impressionist French painter who was one of the revolutionaries
of the Nabis movement that paved the way for abstraction, Edouard
Vuillard had a long career spanning the late 19th and nearly half of
the 20th Century. His work, often with luminosity, became
increasingly abstract and colorful, which some art historians link to
Henri Matisse and the Fauves. Among his subjects were figures in
interiors, landscapes, portraiture and large-scale decorations, and
methods included drawings, graphics, folding screen painting, theatre-program
designs, ceramics and photographs as well as oil painting.
Of his five panel screen, Place Vintimille, he completed in 1911 and that is an elaborate depiction of city life around a park, he wrote: "Voilà: Place Vintimille,
so green with spring and full of life! I love this view from my
apartment window. Do you see the narrow brown buildings across the park
and the double-decker cart in the street below? Look, there is a boy
checking his bicycle tire, and nearby, a man sleeping against the
fence. Of course, you can always find all sorts of vendors and nannies
walking with their little ones. For me, the sidewalk winds around the
park like a creamy ribbon, wrapping everything in a package of
sparkling color." (National Gallery of Art)
The availability of Kodak cameras and their portability to get lasting
images from which to model was a big enhancement to Vuillard and other
painters of his era, especially the Nabis that included Pierre Bonnard,
Maurice Denis and Felix Vallotton. When Vuillard began using the
camera frequently at the turn of the century, his output of landscape
paintings increased, one of the reasons being that he loved staying
in the countryside to take photos.
Born in Cuiseaux in Saone-et-Loire with the full name of Jean-Edouard
Vuillard, he spent his childhood in Paris and attended the Lycée
Condorcet where Maurice Denis was a fellow student. In 1885, when
he was seventeen, he joined the studio of Diogene Maillart (1840-1926)
and received the basics in art training. At that time he began a
pattern of frequently visiting the Louvre and
filling his journals with sketches, particularly of the Dutch and
Italian Old Master. Unlike most of his male peers who joined the
army, he determined to become an artist. He remained unmarried
and lived with his mother, a dressmaker, until he was age sixty.
He died in La Baule, France in 1940.
In January to May, 2003, an exhibition of work by Vuillard opened at
the National Gallery in Washington DC and then traveled to
collaborating museums: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Réunion des
musées nationaux/Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and the Royal Academy of Arts,
London.
Sources include:
http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pbio?32500
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/vuillardinfo.shtm
http://www.nga.gov/programs/abstracts/vuillard.shtm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edouard_Vuillard
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Biography from Anderson Galleries, Inc.:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
Edouard Vuillard was born in 1868 in Cuiseaux, a tiny French town near
the Swiss border. At the age of nine, he moved with his family to
Paris. Edouard’s father, a retired army officer, died several
years later, leaving Edouard’s mother, Marie, to support the three
children with only a small income. She came from a family of
textile designers, and to make a living she first operated a lingerie
shop and then a dressmaking business from the succession of Paris
apartments that the family occupied.
Surrounded by the women and fabrics that filled her workroom, Edouard
lived with his mother, his greatest supporter for her entire
life. In his paintings, he confined himself primarily to scenes
of cozy, cluttered interiors, often using his mother and sister as
models. His interior scenes are characterized by a lavish use of
pattern—wallpaper, upholstery, and dress fabrics, closely juxtaposed to
create an almost collage-like effect.
In 1888, Vuillard studied
briefly at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Jean-Léon Gérôme, but soon
left because he disliked the conservative approach. Later that
year he moved to the Académie Julian, where he met other young artists
who rejected both academic art and Impressionism. Vuillard associated
with this group, known as the Nabis. By the turn of the century he was
making striking, large-scale decorative wall paintings, folding
screens, and portraits of prosperous French families. While
Vuillard’s art remained figurative, his intense focus on the picture
surface itself—the flattened, sometimes unpainted support patterned
with figures that blended with their surroundings—would foreshadow
elements of abstraction in the 20th century.
Museum Collections
Include: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musee d’Orsay, Paris;
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Art
Institute of Chicago; Hermitage, St. Petersburg; Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;
Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Los
Angeles County Museum of Art; Clark Art Institute, Williamstown;
Cleveland Museum of Art; Tate Gallery, London; numerous other
international and regional museums
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