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Lot Essay
'Je n'ai jamais t qu'un spectateur' (Edouard Vuillard, quoted in C. Roger Marx, Vuillard et son temps, Paris, 1945, p. 23).
His mother's workshop, his friends' sitting rooms, and the city's public parks provided Vuillard with his favourite subject-matter. Au spectacle, however, belongs to a small group of works executed in the mid to late 1890s with a theatre or caf-concert setting, another example being Au thatre (Zurich, Bhrle Collection). All the works of this period share a common strand of Vuillard's quietly confident journey away from the principally planar, decorative concerns of his early Nabis years and towards more complex spatial organisation.
The fugitive viewpoint and indistinct forms of Au spectacle are classically intimiste elements. Where Bonnard in his 1890s pictures frequently interposes the arc of a table top between the viewer and the picture plane, Vuillard here, as in his La dame en bleu (fig 1), places the back of his foremost figure squarely in front of the spectator. This bold compositional device recalls the foreground figures in Gauguin's La vision aprs le sermon (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Art, W.245).
The fusion of the familiar and the daring at the core of Vuillard's art was touched upon by Paul Signac. After visiting Vuillard in 1898, he wrote: 'He has a marvellous understanding of the timbre of things...So strong, in his work, is the element of fantasy that he has to keep these little panels: it would be practically impossible for him to go further. The people in his pictures are not properly defined. As he's an admirable draughtsman it must be that he just doesn't want to give them mouths and hands and feet. His finished pictures are like sketches. If he had to work on a bigger scale he'd have to be more exact - and what would become of him then?' (quoted in J. Russell, Edouard Vuillard 1868-1940, London, 1971, p. 95).
The present work will be included in the forthcoming Edouard Vuillard catalogue raisonn currently being prepared by Antoine Salomon.
His mother's workshop, his friends' sitting rooms, and the city's public parks provided Vuillard with his favourite subject-matter. Au spectacle, however, belongs to a small group of works executed in the mid to late 1890s with a theatre or caf-concert setting, another example being Au thatre (Zurich, Bhrle Collection). All the works of this period share a common strand of Vuillard's quietly confident journey away from the principally planar, decorative concerns of his early Nabis years and towards more complex spatial organisation.
The fugitive viewpoint and indistinct forms of Au spectacle are classically intimiste elements. Where Bonnard in his 1890s pictures frequently interposes the arc of a table top between the viewer and the picture plane, Vuillard here, as in his La dame en bleu (fig 1), places the back of his foremost figure squarely in front of the spectator. This bold compositional device recalls the foreground figures in Gauguin's La vision aprs le sermon (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Art, W.245).
The fusion of the familiar and the daring at the core of Vuillard's art was touched upon by Paul Signac. After visiting Vuillard in 1898, he wrote: 'He has a marvellous understanding of the timbre of things...So strong, in his work, is the element of fantasy that he has to keep these little panels: it would be practically impossible for him to go further. The people in his pictures are not properly defined. As he's an admirable draughtsman it must be that he just doesn't want to give them mouths and hands and feet. His finished pictures are like sketches. If he had to work on a bigger scale he'd have to be more exact - and what would become of him then?' (quoted in J. Russell, Edouard Vuillard 1868-1940, London, 1971, p. 95).
The present work will be included in the forthcoming Edouard Vuillard catalogue raisonn currently being prepared by Antoine Salomon.