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Lot Essay
In La salle à manger au château des Clayes, painted in 1938, Édouard Vuillard returned to the subject that distinguished his later career: the domestic interior, and the beauty of everyday life unfolding within it, on a scale that is both impressive and rare for the artist. The present picture reveals Vuillard’s remarkable sensitivity to the poetry of the domestic interior, as elegantly dressed bourgeois figures engage in casual conversation within the formal setting of a dining room.
The setting was the Château des Clayes, the country residence near Versailles acquired in 1925 by Jos and Lucie Hessel, whom counted among Vuillard’s most important patrons and lifelong friends. Jos Hessel, a partner in the prominent Parisian art-dealing firm Bernheim-Jeune, was Vuillard’s principal agent and dealer. Lucie, meanwhile, was his muse and confidante, and one of Vuillard’s most frequent subjects until his death in 1940. Vuillard frequently travelled with the Hessels and stayed in their homes, and Les Clayes became both a favoured retreat and a source of inspiration during the last twelve years of his life. Vuillard had rooms of his own there and was absorbed into the rhythms of the household, observing its long meals and the visiting friends, writers and dealers who gathered around the Hessels.
In the present work, this attention was directed towards a circle Vuillard knew with exceptional intimacy. Lucie Hessel appears at the far right of the table, conversing with the playwright Romain Coolus, while Lulu Hessel, the daughter of the family, sits nearer the centre. Yet the character of the gathering emerges as much through gesture as through likeness: a shoulder inclines forward, and conversation moves naturally across the table. There is none of the stiffness of an arranged group portrait; Vuillard catches the moment when the formalities of dinner have relaxed and conversation has taken over. As Vuillard himself put it: “I do not make portraits, I paint people at home” (quoted in J. Warnod, Vuillard, New York, 1989, p. 47). This contrast between highly refined individuals and their intimate, relaxed poses is characteristic of his later work.
The warm ochres, terracottas and russet tones of the interior are enlivened by flashes of lemon yellow and green gathered in the mass of flowers at the centre of the table, while rapid strokes of cream and white suggest the flicker of glassware and china. Executed in détrempe on ochre-coloured paper, the exposed ochre becomes an active element within the composition, binding the various passages together while preserving the freshness and immediacy of Vuillard’s touch. “Vuillard first used détrempe as a scene painter in the theater 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 appropriate, in different ways, the flat wall-enhancing effects of fresco.” (B. Thomson, Vuillard, New York, 1988, p. 44).
This subtle use of colour indeed recalls Vuillard’s artistic beginnings as a Nabi. In the 1890s, as a member of the Nabis alongside Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier, Vuillard belonged to a group that sought to be the prophets of a renewed art - one that favoured rich patterns and palettes, symbolism and metaphor, and dreamlike imagery. Another, smaller view of the dining room at Les Clayes, executed around the same time as the present picture, is in the Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.
At its imposing scale, however, the present work is exceptional in the way it transforms this private world into a shared experience. A long dining table pushes to the foreground, the seated figures beneath the high ceiling approach our own proportions, while glasses, flowers and plates appear almost within reach. On a sideboard behind them stands an enormous bouquet of flowers and a large mirror, in which the guests are reflected. The painting possesses the presence of a room rather than simply an image of one, drawing the spectator physically into the gathering. The viewer is no longer merely an observer, but almost another guest, invited into the crowd and conversation.
The setting was the Château des Clayes, the country residence near Versailles acquired in 1925 by Jos and Lucie Hessel, whom counted among Vuillard’s most important patrons and lifelong friends. Jos Hessel, a partner in the prominent Parisian art-dealing firm Bernheim-Jeune, was Vuillard’s principal agent and dealer. Lucie, meanwhile, was his muse and confidante, and one of Vuillard’s most frequent subjects until his death in 1940. Vuillard frequently travelled with the Hessels and stayed in their homes, and Les Clayes became both a favoured retreat and a source of inspiration during the last twelve years of his life. Vuillard had rooms of his own there and was absorbed into the rhythms of the household, observing its long meals and the visiting friends, writers and dealers who gathered around the Hessels.
In the present work, this attention was directed towards a circle Vuillard knew with exceptional intimacy. Lucie Hessel appears at the far right of the table, conversing with the playwright Romain Coolus, while Lulu Hessel, the daughter of the family, sits nearer the centre. Yet the character of the gathering emerges as much through gesture as through likeness: a shoulder inclines forward, and conversation moves naturally across the table. There is none of the stiffness of an arranged group portrait; Vuillard catches the moment when the formalities of dinner have relaxed and conversation has taken over. As Vuillard himself put it: “I do not make portraits, I paint people at home” (quoted in J. Warnod, Vuillard, New York, 1989, p. 47). This contrast between highly refined individuals and their intimate, relaxed poses is characteristic of his later work.
The warm ochres, terracottas and russet tones of the interior are enlivened by flashes of lemon yellow and green gathered in the mass of flowers at the centre of the table, while rapid strokes of cream and white suggest the flicker of glassware and china. Executed in détrempe on ochre-coloured paper, the exposed ochre becomes an active element within the composition, binding the various passages together while preserving the freshness and immediacy of Vuillard’s touch. “Vuillard first used détrempe as a scene painter in the theater 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 appropriate, in different ways, the flat wall-enhancing effects of fresco.” (B. Thomson, Vuillard, New York, 1988, p. 44).
This subtle use of colour indeed recalls Vuillard’s artistic beginnings as a Nabi. In the 1890s, as a member of the Nabis alongside Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier, Vuillard belonged to a group that sought to be the prophets of a renewed art - one that favoured rich patterns and palettes, symbolism and metaphor, and dreamlike imagery. Another, smaller view of the dining room at Les Clayes, executed around the same time as the present picture, is in the Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.
At its imposing scale, however, the present work is exceptional in the way it transforms this private world into a shared experience. A long dining table pushes to the foreground, the seated figures beneath the high ceiling approach our own proportions, while glasses, flowers and plates appear almost within reach. On a sideboard behind them stands an enormous bouquet of flowers and a large mirror, in which the guests are reflected. The painting possesses the presence of a room rather than simply an image of one, drawing the spectator physically into the gathering. The viewer is no longer merely an observer, but almost another guest, invited into the crowd and conversation.