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Lot Essay
Painted in 1898, Paravent de Stéphane Natanson. Figures dans un intérieur is an important multi-panel work by Edouard Vuillard, that explores two of the artist’s favourite themes, which came to define his career: the domestic interior and portraiture.
In the present four-panel screen, Stéphane Natanson, who commissioned the work, is depicted along with Misia Natanson, in Les Relais, the home Misia shared with her husband, Thadée, the cousin of Stéphane. In this work – only the second of three folding screens which Vuillard completed during his career – there is a distinct sense of intimacy, in which the Natansons appear completely at home in their environment.
Stéphane is depicted in the second panel, facing Misia, his head resting on his left arm, lost in thought. Misia sits draped across the third and fourth panels, her head tilted away from the viewer, towards the small bouquet of flowers in the background of the third panel. In the foreground is a much larger bouquet, at once delicate and impressive, flat yet tactile. The Natansons were at the epicentre of Parisian artistic and literary circles in the 1890s. The brothers Alxandre, Alfred and Thadée, Stéphane’s cousins, were the founders of the avant-garde magazine La revue blanche, an acclaimed publication which included contributions from writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Proust. Vuillard first entered the Natansons’ orbit in 1891, when Thadée – a keen advocate of the band of young avant-garde painters who called themselves the Nabis – gave the artist his first solo exhibition in the offices of La revue blanche. Stéphane Natanson was an architect by profession, and had designed the house for the family of Paul Demarais, who had been was responsible for the first major commission of Vuillard’s career. In 1892, he had engaged the artist to create six decorative panels and the first of his folding screens, to decorate the aforementioned house. Stéphane Natanson may well have been inspired by this project at the Demarais home and commissioned the present folding screen just a few years later.
Misia, meanwhile, was perhaps the most illustrious member of the Natanson family, often posing for the covers of La revue blanche, as well as for posters created by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard. ‘Her position, combined with her unique personal style, her seductive charm, and her almost physical need to be constantly surrounded by people, was to make her the magnetic center, the feminine touchstone for one of the most gifted circles of artists Paris has ever known,’ Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale have observed (Misia: The Life of Misia Sert, New York, 1980, p. 38).
Indeed, Misia was Vuillard’s perennial muse and the object of his unrequited infatuation during the last years of the nineteenth century. In a letter to Misia, he wrote, ‘I have always been shy in your presence, but the security, the assurance of a perfect understanding relieved me of all embarrassment; nothing was lost by this understanding being a wordless one’ (quoted in M. Sert, Two or Three Muses: The Memoirs of Misia Sert, trans. M. Budgberg, London, 1953, p. 52).
For Vuillard, his deepening relationship with the Natansons was like a religious conversion, life-changing and all-consuming. By the middle of the decade, he saw them almost daily. They purchased his work in large quantities and recommended him unreservedly to their friends. They afforded him inside access to the very latest in arts and ideas, and they demonstrated a way of life—a taste and a culture—that fascinated the young artist. In his paintings of Misia, Vuillard gloried in the luxury of the Natansons’ environment and the arresting personality of his model.
‘Vuillard’s vision of reality,’ Guy Cogeval has written, ‘which melded bodies, faces, inanimate objects, flowers, draperies and light into a single texture, was developed and supported by his contact with Misia, whose appearance in the interiors he painted represented a daily miracle for him. His painting, even when Misia was not in the picture, was conditioned by the imprint in space of her passing’ (A. Salomon and G. Cogeval, Vuillard: Le regard innombrable, Catalogue critique des peintures et pastels, Vol. I, Paris, 2003, pp. 454-455).
The present picture is demonstrative of this ‘single texture.’ The linen on which the work is painted is visible throughout, and there are many areas which remain untouched, flattening the surface and unifying every element of the scene. The decision to use distemper rather than oil paint also helps to create a uniform surface, allowing for the ‘faces’ and the ‘inanimate objects’ to be ‘melded’ together, an almost translucent window into the lives of both Vuillard and the Natansons.
In the present four-panel screen, Stéphane Natanson, who commissioned the work, is depicted along with Misia Natanson, in Les Relais, the home Misia shared with her husband, Thadée, the cousin of Stéphane. In this work – only the second of three folding screens which Vuillard completed during his career – there is a distinct sense of intimacy, in which the Natansons appear completely at home in their environment.
Stéphane is depicted in the second panel, facing Misia, his head resting on his left arm, lost in thought. Misia sits draped across the third and fourth panels, her head tilted away from the viewer, towards the small bouquet of flowers in the background of the third panel. In the foreground is a much larger bouquet, at once delicate and impressive, flat yet tactile. The Natansons were at the epicentre of Parisian artistic and literary circles in the 1890s. The brothers Alxandre, Alfred and Thadée, Stéphane’s cousins, were the founders of the avant-garde magazine La revue blanche, an acclaimed publication which included contributions from writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Proust. Vuillard first entered the Natansons’ orbit in 1891, when Thadée – a keen advocate of the band of young avant-garde painters who called themselves the Nabis – gave the artist his first solo exhibition in the offices of La revue blanche. Stéphane Natanson was an architect by profession, and had designed the house for the family of Paul Demarais, who had been was responsible for the first major commission of Vuillard’s career. In 1892, he had engaged the artist to create six decorative panels and the first of his folding screens, to decorate the aforementioned house. Stéphane Natanson may well have been inspired by this project at the Demarais home and commissioned the present folding screen just a few years later.
Misia, meanwhile, was perhaps the most illustrious member of the Natanson family, often posing for the covers of La revue blanche, as well as for posters created by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard. ‘Her position, combined with her unique personal style, her seductive charm, and her almost physical need to be constantly surrounded by people, was to make her the magnetic center, the feminine touchstone for one of the most gifted circles of artists Paris has ever known,’ Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale have observed (Misia: The Life of Misia Sert, New York, 1980, p. 38).
Indeed, Misia was Vuillard’s perennial muse and the object of his unrequited infatuation during the last years of the nineteenth century. In a letter to Misia, he wrote, ‘I have always been shy in your presence, but the security, the assurance of a perfect understanding relieved me of all embarrassment; nothing was lost by this understanding being a wordless one’ (quoted in M. Sert, Two or Three Muses: The Memoirs of Misia Sert, trans. M. Budgberg, London, 1953, p. 52).
For Vuillard, his deepening relationship with the Natansons was like a religious conversion, life-changing and all-consuming. By the middle of the decade, he saw them almost daily. They purchased his work in large quantities and recommended him unreservedly to their friends. They afforded him inside access to the very latest in arts and ideas, and they demonstrated a way of life—a taste and a culture—that fascinated the young artist. In his paintings of Misia, Vuillard gloried in the luxury of the Natansons’ environment and the arresting personality of his model.
‘Vuillard’s vision of reality,’ Guy Cogeval has written, ‘which melded bodies, faces, inanimate objects, flowers, draperies and light into a single texture, was developed and supported by his contact with Misia, whose appearance in the interiors he painted represented a daily miracle for him. His painting, even when Misia was not in the picture, was conditioned by the imprint in space of her passing’ (A. Salomon and G. Cogeval, Vuillard: Le regard innombrable, Catalogue critique des peintures et pastels, Vol. I, Paris, 2003, pp. 454-455).
The present picture is demonstrative of this ‘single texture.’ The linen on which the work is painted is visible throughout, and there are many areas which remain untouched, flattening the surface and unifying every element of the scene. The decision to use distemper rather than oil paint also helps to create a uniform surface, allowing for the ‘faces’ and the ‘inanimate objects’ to be ‘melded’ together, an almost translucent window into the lives of both Vuillard and the Natansons.