Édouard Vuillard

Antoine Salomon, Paris
Henry Fischbach, New York (acquired circa 1964)

Milan, Palazzo Reale, Édouard Vuillard, 1959, no. 71, illustrated in the catalogue
Albi, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Vuillard, 1960, no. 52
Paris, Durand-Ruel, É. Vuillard (1868-1940), 1961, no. 46, illustrated in the catalogue
New York, Wildenstein & Co., Vuillard, 1964. no. 49, illustrated in the catalogue

Claude Roger-Marx, Vuillard. Intérieurs, Paris & Lausanne, 1968, illustrated pl. 13
Antoine Salomon & Guy Cogeval, Vuillard, The Inexhaustible Glance, Critical Catalogue of the Paintings and Pastels, Paris, 2003,  vol. II, no. VIII-286, illustrated in colour p. 960

The work is in very good condition. Executed on paper mounted on canvas. The extreme outer edges of the composition are lined with tape. There is some very faint staining to the surface visible to the upper left quadrant.Very fine lines of stable cracking are also visible in some places where the pigment is thickest, for example toward the extreme edges as well as a vertical line running through the center of the lamp shade and a few lines scatteredwithin the gray pigment at top right. Two pindot losses are visible, one toward the upper right corner (approx. two inches below and three inches to the left) and the other just left of the middle of the lamp base. A diagonal line runs approximately six unches along the bottom left corner where the sheet appears to be joined. There is no pigment at the extreme bottom left corner of the composition where the cut sheet is visible though no losses are apparent. Under UV light: certain pigments fluoresce and a few half-inch brustrokes of inpaintings are visible along the extreme lower left edge.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Painted in 1909, Sous la grande lampe à Saint-Jacut is a wonderful example of Édouard Vuillard’s life-long interest in domestic interiors. This work, similar to Les Amis autour de la table, depicts a summer day in Saint-Jacut, the rented home of Jos and Lucy Hessel, the couple that Vuillard spent each summer with from 1901 until his death in 1940. From 1901 to 1914, when World War I made such holidays impossible, they spent these summers in Normandy or Brittany, where studied relaxation was the paramount means of occupation. 'What did a country holiday mean to Vuillard and his hosts? An art of refined leisure. What did people do? Embroidered, played cards and draughts, read, got up late and strolled gently down to the beach in the afternoon to make the most of the sunshine. The pleasure of going to spend part of the year on the Channel coast was in fact quite new, and seaside resorts like Deauville were of recent growth' (Antoine Salomon & Guy Cogeval, op. cit., p. 822).

Vuillard was also a consummate photographer, leaving over two thousand images after his death. The pictures he took with his Kodak roll film camera, an invention of the 1880s, would often be used in his later paintings and the immediacy of the present lot is testament to his experiments with the camera. Sous la grande lampe à Saint-Jacut was executed using distemper, a medium that he began to use more and more frequently. Kimberly Jones writes: 'These two summers Vuillard spent in Brittany [1908-09]—and especially the summer at Saint-Jacut—were intensely productive. The paintings he produced are exceptionally striking, in large part because of a growing preference for the medium of peinture à la colle, or distemper. Roger-Marx has compared the Brittany paintings to the works of the Impressionists Eugène Boudin and Berthe Morisot in particular, citing the blond tonalities and spontaneity of the execution. Yet such a comparison does no justice to Vuillard. His Brittany paintings, audacious in their abstraction, subordinate the impulse towards naturalism to more fundamental pictorial concerns…There is an unprecedented freedom in this mingling of medium and support in the Brittany paintings, all the more striking in view of the painstaking and preplanned method imposed by peinture à la colle, which effectively precluded working directly from the motif. The illusion of spontaneity that permeates these paintings is precisely that' (Édouard Vuillard (exhibition catalogue), The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. & travelling, 2003-04, pp. 449-450).