Vuillard, Edouard

1868-1940
Vuillard, Edouard Biography

French painter of intimate interior scenes, whose individualistic technique set him apart from most of his contemporaries. Edouard Vuillard studied art in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Julian. He exhibited with the Nabis group in 1891 but was only slightly influenced by them. His main inspiration was from the stylizations of Japanese prints and from the paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Edouard Vuillard met Bonnard, Paul Serusier, and Felix Vallotton while studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and, along with his old friends Maurice Denis and Ker-Xavier Roussel, they formed an association called the Nabis that drew its inspiration from the Synthetist works of Gauguin's Pont-Aven period. In 1899 the Nabis exhibited together for the last time. That year Vuillard painted works that show the influence of the techniques of Impressionism and his admiration for the subtle interior compositions of Manet and Degas. He also executed two series of masterful lithographs that reveal his great debt to Japanese woodcuts, then in vogue inEurope.

Edouard Vuillard never married. He lived with his widowed mother until her death, and the majority of his works deal with domestic scenes set in his mother's bourgeois home. As early as 1892, his production of small oil paintings of daily home life, such as Woman Sweeping (c. 1892; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), led him to be called an Intimist.

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