.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Vuillard catalogue raisonné being prepared by Antoine Salomon and published by the Wildenstein Institute.
Les Clayes was the chateau owned by Jos and Lucie Hessel, who after 1900, became two of Vuillard's most intimate friends. Jos Hessel began collecting Vuillard's works after noticing them for the first time at La Revue Blanche. He worked at the gallery Bernheim-Jeune and together with the Bernheim brothers was instrumental in opening the doors to the avant-garde of the time. His wife, Lucie, whom gossips nicknamed was one of the artists's favorite subjects until his death in 1940.
Vuillard often attended the fashionable social events and friendly gatherings. Here took place at Les Clayes where he would quietly observe the guests, filling his notebooks with sketches. The château's sumptuous interiors often appear as settings in his later works. Vuillard used to say "I do not make portraits, I paint people at home" (quoted in J. Warnod, Vuillard, New York, 1989, p. 47).
In the present painting, Vuillard masterfully displays elegantly dressed bourgoisie involved in casual conversation within a formal dining room setting. This contrast of luxurious individuals shown in intimate and relaxed poses is typical of his later works. "In an unsystematic way he assembled as complete a record as any we have of the way well-to-do people looked and behaved in the France of the Third Republic" (J. Russel, Vuillard, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1971, p. 69).
La salle à manger au château de Clayes was painted using the medium dètrempe. "[Vuillard] first used détrempe as a scene painter in the theatre and liked its quick-drying properties as well as its chalky, unreflective surface, which harmonized well in an interior setting . . . In cultivating a dry, matte, quality, Vuillard was in tune with most of the decorative painters of his generation who, in the wake of Puvis and Gauguin, sought to avoid the illusion of depth and reflective properties associated with oil paint and to approximate, in different ways, the flat wall-enhancing effects of fresco" (B. Thomson, Vuillard, New York, 1988, p. 44).
Les Clayes was the chateau owned by Jos and Lucie Hessel, who after 1900, became two of Vuillard's most intimate friends. Jos Hessel began collecting Vuillard's works after noticing them for the first time at La Revue Blanche. He worked at the gallery Bernheim-Jeune and together with the Bernheim brothers was instrumental in opening the doors to the avant-garde of the time. His wife, Lucie, whom gossips nicknamed was one of the artists's favorite subjects until his death in 1940.
Vuillard often attended the fashionable social events and friendly gatherings. Here took place at Les Clayes where he would quietly observe the guests, filling his notebooks with sketches. The château's sumptuous interiors often appear as settings in his later works. Vuillard used to say "I do not make portraits, I paint people at home" (quoted in J. Warnod, Vuillard, New York, 1989, p. 47).
In the present painting, Vuillard masterfully displays elegantly dressed bourgoisie involved in casual conversation within a formal dining room setting. This contrast of luxurious individuals shown in intimate and relaxed poses is typical of his later works. "In an unsystematic way he assembled as complete a record as any we have of the way well-to-do people looked and behaved in the France of the Third Republic" (J. Russel, Vuillard, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1971, p. 69).
La salle à manger au château de Clayes was painted using the medium dètrempe. "[Vuillard] first used détrempe as a scene painter in the theatre and liked its quick-drying properties as well as its chalky, unreflective surface, which harmonized well in an interior setting . . . In cultivating a dry, matte, quality, Vuillard was in tune with most of the decorative painters of his generation who, in the wake of Puvis and Gauguin, sought to avoid the illusion of depth and reflective properties associated with oil paint and to approximate, in different ways, the flat wall-enhancing effects of fresco" (B. Thomson, Vuillard, New York, 1988, p. 44).