Vuillard

Description

Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) was one of France’s most strongly and consistently revered painters. Vuillard belonged to the generation of young, experimental artists at the forefront of French art that included Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, who lived and worked in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This group of artists, who in the early 1890s formed the Nabis group, were strongly influenced by Paul Gauguin’s striking use of colour and symbolism. Seeking an escape from naturalism, Vuillard employed intense colours and simplified forms in his portraits, interiors and landscapes. Alongside his friend Bonnard, he was one of the main practitioners of Intimisme – intimate domestic genre painting.

A master of painting technique, Vuillard’s work is characterized by his dynamic use of colour and his versatile emphasis on surface pattern and decoration.

Belinda Thomson is an independent scholar and Honorary Fellow in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The Post-Impressionists, also published by Phaidon.’Belinda Thomson’s excellent and skilled biography is the finest analysis of Vuillard’s life we have … This sympathetic, vivid and detailed account is exemplary.’ (Marina Vaizey, author and critic)