![]() Vuillard became close to the journal’s founders, the brothers Alexandre and Thadée Natanson, who gave him some of the first of many commissions he received from the French patron class for large-scale panel paintings to decorate their homes. Vuillard and the Nabis also contributed illustrations to the progressive journal La revue blanche, which was closely connected to that theater. The Nabis painters’ close connection to the Symbolist theater, also emerging at that time, was important to Vuillard’s development as an artist, and he produced stage sets and theater programs for Lugné-Poe’s Theatre de l’Oeuvre (1893). In 1890 Vuillard shared a studio with Bonnard, his closest peer, and others, including the actor and theater director Aurélien Lugné-Poe. “I go on with my work according to my conscience, endeavouring to express what I feel and what I love, and I have no other goal,” Vuillard explained. Collectively, the Nabis artists maintained that art was a synthesis of metaphors and symbols manifested in everyday life. With them he shared an admiration for the asymmetrical stylizations of Japanese woodblock prints, and for the bold color and flattened space that Paul Gauguin was forging in avant-garde painting. ![]() He abandoned his plans for a military career and by 1890 had joined forces with artists Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and others to form a group that called itself Les Nabis (from the Hebrew for prophet). Her love and knowledge of the materials of her craft made an impression on the young artist-he developed an interest in the most decorative and intimate objects of their workroom apartment: jumbled off-cuts of fabric, curtains, lamps. Vuillard’s father died when he was 15 afterward, his mother supported the family as a seamstress. ![]() In doing so, he treated all the elements in his paintings as equal components of an ornamental whole. Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893) exemplifies the introspective, subtly disquieting mood that Vuillard achieved by allowing flattened, compressed space and complex patterning to nearly obscure the figures in his compositions. His scenes of everyday life were anchored in the family’s apartment-intimate realms dominated by women. If it was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec who indelibly captured the spectacle of public life in the cafés and cabarets of Paris in the 1890s, it was Édouard Vuillard who conjured the muffled quiet and richly patterned textures of private life inside the city’s bourgeois homes and gardens. “I don't paint portraits, I paint people in their homes.” ![]()
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