Édouard Vuillard

Estate of the artist; 

Sam Salz, Inc., New York; 

Leona M. Helmsley; 

Christie's, New York, 7 May 2008, lot 400 (consigned by the estate of the above); 

Where acquired by the present collector.

A. Salomon and G. Cogeval, Vuillard, The Inexhaustible Glance: Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, vol. II, Paris 2003; no. VIII-63 (front), p. 863, reproduced; no. VIII-41 (reverse), p. 852, reproduced.

Vuillard painted the present work in 1902 while staying at Les Myosotis, a villa in the Norman seaside town of Villerville. The front, Ébauche pour la salle à manger, depicts the artist’s mother seated at a dining table in a sunlit interior. Though unfinished, the composition reveals Vuillard’s extraordinary sensitivity to color. A broad, unmodulated field of red frames Madame Vuillard, causing her soft pink blouse to stand out against the crisp white tablecloth. Decorative motifs within the ceramics, the patterned table covering, and her dress generate layers of visual complexity despite the artist’s relatively sparse application of medium. In their catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval have identified Ébauche pour la salle à manger as a preparatory study related to a group of at least five paintings portraying Madame Vuillard at the same table.

A fitting counterpoint to the private interior scene on the front of the canvas, La Cabine sur la plage on its reverse depicts three figures lounging in reclining chairs along the shore. Bold swaths of green and red envelop the figures, contouring and defining their forms, while passages of steel blue sky emerge from the sunbleached background. The open windows of the cabine offer a glimpse into a richly ornamented interior, creating a visual dialogue between enclosed and open spaces. In both paintings, Vuillard creates a playful tension by blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior realms. Sunlight streaming in through the windows in Ébauche pour la salle à manger illuminates the lower register of the composition, while the open windows in La Cabine sur la plage bring pattern and ornament into the outdoor environment, calling attention to the divided yet porous relationship between private and public experience so essential to Les Nabis.