Édouard Vuillard

Jean-Édouard Vuillard, 1868 to 1940, was a French painter and printmaker associated with the Nabis. He studied at the Lycée Condorcet. In 1887, after three unsuccessful attempts, Vuillard passed the entrance examination for the École des Beaux-Arts. By 1890, the year in which Vuillard met Pierre Bonnard and Paul Sérusier, he had joined the Nabis, a group of art students inspired by the synthetism of Gauguin. He contributed to their exhibitions at the Gallery of Le Barc de Boutteville, and later shared a studio with fellow Nabis Bonnard and Maurice Denis. In the early 1890s, he worked for the Théâtre de l'Œuvre of Lugné-Poe designing settings and programs. Vuillard first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants of 1901 and at the Salon d'Automne in 1903. In the 1890s Vuillard met the brothers Alexandre and Thadée Natanson, the founders of La Revue Blanche, a cultural review. Vuillardʹs graphics appeared in the journal, together with Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Félix Vallotton and others. In his paintings and decorative pieces, Vuillard depicted mostly interiors, streets, and gardens. Marked by a gentle humor, they are executed in the delicate range of soft, blurred colors characteristic of his art. Living with his mother, a dressmaker, until the age of sixty, Vuillard was very familiar with interior and domestic spaces. Much of his art reflected this influence, largely decorative and often depicting very intricate patterns. In 1912, Vuillard painted Théodore Duret in his Study, a commissioned portrait that signaled a new phase in Vuillard's work, which was dominated by portraiture from 1920 onwards

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