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Lot Essay
Painted in 1925-1926, Edouard Vuillard’s Jean Laroche is a sumptuous and sprawling testament to the enduring friendship between the artist and his eponymous sitter, the Parisian banker and collector, Jean Laroche. The two first became acquainted at the onset of World War I, with their ensuing friendship marked by frequent patronage. Over the years, Laroche commissioned a series of portraits and decorative panels from the artist, the first of which was a nearly life-size drawing of his young son, Jacques Laroche (Salomon and Cogeval, no. X-215; sale, Christie’s, New York, 13 May 2016, lot 1083). It was Jacques who, nearly a decade later, would first propose to Vuillard over dinner the idea of commissioning a portrait of his father, the result of which is the present canvas.
Vuillard depicts Laroche seated in his salon and surrounded by a profusion of French furniture and objet d’art, from lustrous velveteen armchairs and porcelain chinoiserie to an oil painting artfully hung atop a tapestry. Within this elaborate setting does the rich and pictorially complex interior unfold, a brilliant evocation of fin-de-siècle Parisian taste for the eclectic and highly decorative. Ever the astute observer, Vuillard here delights in this painterly transcription of such extravagant materiality, from the flickering of a gilded cabinet corner to the translucency of the attenuated glass vase. Framing Laroche on the far wall are two immediately identifiable paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir: the 1903 Baigneuse (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna) and the circa 1879 Femme à l’éventail (The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts). It is perhaps no coincidence that Vuillard chose to capture Laroche—and his two Renoir paintings—from such an angle, a declaration of Vuillard’s skill as a keen observer and resultant ability to deftly render not only his surroundings, but the stylistic nuance of the storied impressionist painter of society. Vuillard takes extra care to transcribe the gaze of Renoir’s Femme à l’éventail, capturing her likeness through a painstaking precision amidst an otherwise painterly approach to the interior.
Despite their delight in materiality, Vuillard’s societal portraits offer more than a mere tepid recording of his patrons and their decadent interiors. Undoubtedly the best known living portraitist at the time, he found immense success in capturing societal types, painting bankers, actresses and even ministers alike. And yet, as Guy Cogival has observed, beneath the superficial typecast, Vuillard “had the gift of attaching to each sitter an apparently unimportant object or attribute that gradually absorbed his or her psychological truth so as to reconstitute it and bring it to the fore” (op. cit., 2003, p. 1297). Known for his fiery demeanor, Laroche is here captured in a moment of contemplative repose, gazing off towards an unknown corner of the room—made all the more palpable by the voyeuristic gaze of Renoir’s Femme à l’éventail suspended just above him. A beam of suffuse light illuminates the side of his face, suggesting yet again that the true protagonist of the scene is in fact not his lavish trappings, but rather his inner psyche. This almost Proustian approach to psychological scrutiny offers a fine thread throughout Vuillard’s oeuvre, from its roots in Symbolism through to his evocative sitters enshrined by their lavish interiors. Regardless of his affections for the friends and patrons that populated his canvases, Vuillard believed that “you begin a portrait without knowing the sitter. When you’ve finished, you know the sitter, but the portrait is no longer a likeness” (Journal, IV.4, 13 November 1931; quoted in ibid., p. 1298).
Vuillard and Laroche would remain lifelong friends until the latter’s death in 1935. Just the year prior, Laroche, a renowned gourmand, published a cookbook, Cuisine: Recueil de 117 recettes, which featured lithographs by the artist. Upon Laroche’s death, the present work passed to his son, Jacques. Other works from the collection were donated to the French national museums, including Vuillard’s superb La Chapelle du chateau de Versailles (Salomon and Cogeval, no. X-187), now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Vuillard depicts Laroche seated in his salon and surrounded by a profusion of French furniture and objet d’art, from lustrous velveteen armchairs and porcelain chinoiserie to an oil painting artfully hung atop a tapestry. Within this elaborate setting does the rich and pictorially complex interior unfold, a brilliant evocation of fin-de-siècle Parisian taste for the eclectic and highly decorative. Ever the astute observer, Vuillard here delights in this painterly transcription of such extravagant materiality, from the flickering of a gilded cabinet corner to the translucency of the attenuated glass vase. Framing Laroche on the far wall are two immediately identifiable paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir: the 1903 Baigneuse (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna) and the circa 1879 Femme à l’éventail (The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts). It is perhaps no coincidence that Vuillard chose to capture Laroche—and his two Renoir paintings—from such an angle, a declaration of Vuillard’s skill as a keen observer and resultant ability to deftly render not only his surroundings, but the stylistic nuance of the storied impressionist painter of society. Vuillard takes extra care to transcribe the gaze of Renoir’s Femme à l’éventail, capturing her likeness through a painstaking precision amidst an otherwise painterly approach to the interior.
Despite their delight in materiality, Vuillard’s societal portraits offer more than a mere tepid recording of his patrons and their decadent interiors. Undoubtedly the best known living portraitist at the time, he found immense success in capturing societal types, painting bankers, actresses and even ministers alike. And yet, as Guy Cogival has observed, beneath the superficial typecast, Vuillard “had the gift of attaching to each sitter an apparently unimportant object or attribute that gradually absorbed his or her psychological truth so as to reconstitute it and bring it to the fore” (op. cit., 2003, p. 1297). Known for his fiery demeanor, Laroche is here captured in a moment of contemplative repose, gazing off towards an unknown corner of the room—made all the more palpable by the voyeuristic gaze of Renoir’s Femme à l’éventail suspended just above him. A beam of suffuse light illuminates the side of his face, suggesting yet again that the true protagonist of the scene is in fact not his lavish trappings, but rather his inner psyche. This almost Proustian approach to psychological scrutiny offers a fine thread throughout Vuillard’s oeuvre, from its roots in Symbolism through to his evocative sitters enshrined by their lavish interiors. Regardless of his affections for the friends and patrons that populated his canvases, Vuillard believed that “you begin a portrait without knowing the sitter. When you’ve finished, you know the sitter, but the portrait is no longer a likeness” (Journal, IV.4, 13 November 1931; quoted in ibid., p. 1298).
Vuillard and Laroche would remain lifelong friends until the latter’s death in 1935. Just the year prior, Laroche, a renowned gourmand, published a cookbook, Cuisine: Recueil de 117 recettes, which featured lithographs by the artist. Upon Laroche’s death, the present work passed to his son, Jacques. Other works from the collection were donated to the French national museums, including Vuillard’s superb La Chapelle du chateau de Versailles (Salomon and Cogeval, no. X-187), now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.