Born in Cuiseaux in France’s Burgundy region, Edouard Vuillard moved to Paris at age nine. There, he attended Lycée Condorcet, where he developed a lifelong friendship with Maurice Denis and future brother-in-law Ker-Xavier Roussel. He further studied at the Académie Julian and Académie des Beaux-Arts, meeting Pierre Bonnard and Paul Sérusier at the latter. Together with Denis and Roussel, they formed the Nabis, a group inspired by asymmetrical aesthetics of Japanese woodblock prints, and the bold colours and flattened planes forged by Paul Gauguin.
After 1900, when the Nabis broke up, Vuillard adopted a more realistic style, painting richly decorated interiors with greater detail (the artist’s mother ran a dressmaking business from their home and Vuillard’s style is said to have been influenced by the textiles that surrounded him growing up). He soon became known for depicting intimate and domestic interior scenes of people — mostly women — engaging in their own private preoccupations. “I don’t paint portraits. I paint people in their homes,” Vuillard is quoted as saying.
In his later years, Vuillard moved toward a more luminous style influenced by Impressionism, but his work nevertheless retained the flat, decorative quality of the Nabis influence. The painting in ECKART ASIA’s collection is reflective of this style.
Vuillard’s works are in the collections of some of the world’s most renowned galleries and art museums, including the Tate Modern in London, The National Galleries of Scotland, The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Guggenheim in New York and The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
