Édouard Vuillard

Carroll Carstairs, New York
Lefevre Gallery, London
Philip & Grace Sandblom, Lausanne (acquired in 1970)
Thence by descent

London, Lefevre Gallery, 1969, no. 18, illustrated in the catalogue
Houston, The Museum of Fine Art; Washington D.C., The Phillips Collection; The Brooklyn Museum, The Intimate Interiors of Édouard Vuillard, 1989-90, no. 56, illustrated in the catalogue
Zurich, Kunsthaus; Paris, Grand Palais & Musée d'Orsay, Die Nabis Propheten der Moderne, 1888-4, no. 157, illustrated in the catalogue

Elizabeth Wynne Easton, The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, Houston, 1989, p. 83
Susan Sidlauskas, "Contesting Femininity: Vuillard's Family Pictures", in The Art Bulletin, vol. 78, no. 1, March 1997, illustrated pp. 99-100
Antoine Salomon & Guy Cogeval, Vuillard, The Inexhaustible Glance, Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, vol. I, Paris, 2003, no. IV-75, illustrated p. 269

In very good condition. This work is laid down on cradled panel. The work has recently been cleaned and re-varnished. Under the U.V, the varnish fluoresces somewhat unevenly and ther is a nailhead sized spot of inpainting at center of the top edge. A small area of older varnish is visible around the signature which was not addressed in the recent cleaning.
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In the 1890s, Édouard Vuillard was associated a group of rebellious artists called Les Nabis, a title taken from the Hebrew name for "prophet."  The group, which included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson and Félix Valloton, was influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin.  The aesthetic goal of Les Nabis was to create a purely pictorial art.  Their subjective interpretation of nature depicted simplified forms, flattened perspectives, exaggerated colors and repeated patterns.

According to Elizabeth Wynne Easton, "As early as November 1888 Vuillard filled a page of his journal with scenes of women working by lamplight around a table.  Although these images were not transformed into paintings until a few years later, they nonetheless were a compelling subject for him from the time he began to think of himself as an artist.  It is perhaps no coincidence that on the same journal page Vuillard made reference to the works in the Louvre of Jan Steen and Chardin and included a sketch of a painting by Vermeer (see fig. 1).  The intimate and sometimes disturbing depictions of daily life that characterize the works of these Dutch masters and the quiet power of Chardin's images of governesses and serving maids form the art historical background to Vuillard's scenes of women at work in his mother's atelier" (E. Wynne Easton, The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, Houston, 1989, p. 26).

The sincerity and complexity of Petite déjeuner devant la fênetre distinguishes itself from other intimate scale paintings by Vuillard.  Instead of depicting his mother, Marie, at work sewing or at the kitchen table, the present work shows an interior with sitters at leisure. In many of his portraits, Vuillard condenses the physical attributes of his figures to gestural brushstrokes that provide clues to the sitters' identity.  In the present work, Vuillard places his figures in pleasant engagement with one another within their intimate domestic setting, suffused with light from the window, and with a sence of abiding calm.

Fig. 1, Johannes Vermeer, Young Girl Sleeping, 1657, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York