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Lot Essay
Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval will include this painting in the forthcoming Vuillard catalogue raisonné under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Institute.
The present painting shows Marie Justine Alexandrine Michaud Vuillard, the artist's mother, at work in her apartment. She was listed professionally as a corsetière, a corset-maker, not a couturière or dressmaker as many have assumed, although some part of her business would have probably involved sewing dresses. Mme Vuillard and her husband, a retired tax collector, moved their family from the provincial town of Cuiseaux to Paris in 1877. In the final months of 1878 Mme Vuillard purchased the corset-making business and the rooms of a Mme Duval-Caron at 60, rue Neuve Saint-Augustin. The family moved several times after Vuillard's father died in 1884, remaining in the area around the Paris Opera district, where the garment trade in Paris was concentrated. The present work was probably painted at 10, rue de Miromesnil. At each address the dining room also served as Mme Vuillard's workplace.
The corset trade was at its peak during the final decade of the 19th century; government ministry figures show the output of lingerie in France in 1890 was double that of the production fifteen years later. Important corset-makers would have connections to major couturières in the city, but Mme Vuillard probably occupied a low rank in her profession, working with a pair of seamstresses and assisted by her daughter Marie. As in many cottage industries at this time Mme Vuillard and her help worked long, tiring hours. Edouard Vuillard was eleven years old when his mother became a corsetière. For the next twenty years, until his mother retired in 1898, the rooms in which she worked were the center of Vuillard's world.
For an artist coming of age in the decade of the Symbolists, these surroundings provided an unlikely but nonetheless unavoidable source of subject matter. It was a quiet, interior world, reminiscent of the paintings of Vermeer and Chardin. It was deeply feminine, but not in the usual Symbolist sense, in which women were usually idle and passive objects of desire. Instead, the women in Vuillard's world were industrious, self-supporting and deeply involved in their work.
Vuillard admired their patience and skill, and he assimilated into his own work many of the qualities that he saw in theirs. At the outset of his career he generally worked in small formats, as seen in the present painting, and composed his interior scenes like a seamstress cutting pieces of plain and patterned cloth and patiently stitching them together to form a whole garment. One may imagine Vuillard working on his small panels with same close proximity and self-absorbed concentration that Mme Vuillard displays in her son's depiction of her.
In works of this kind Vuillard successfully adapted the aesthetics of Symbolism, the lessons of Paul Sérusier's famous Nabi landscape Le Talisman (Guicheteau, no. 2), and the inventive flatness of japonisme to the realism of his subject matter. "For all their earthiness and concern for telling detail, these paintings transcend the merely workaday to a realm of emotional truth that is beyond specific time and place" (E.W. Easton, exh. cat., The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, op. cit, p. 26). The rooms at 10, rue de Miromesnil were probably more Spartan than the family's later quarters on the rue Saint-Honoré, where they moved in 1893. In the present painting the absence of decorative wall papers in the background, the subdued tonal harmonies, and the clever use of the tondo format to circumscribe the scene, contribute to a simple, yet timeless and ritualistic aspect. The novelist André Gide later wrote about Vuillard:
There is nothing sentimental or high-fatulin' about the discreet melancholy which pervades his work. Its dress is that of everyday. It is tender, and caressing For all his success, I can sense in Vuillard the charm of anxiety and doubt. He never brings forward a color without making it possible for it to fall back, subtly and delightfully, into the background. Too fastidious for plain statement, he proceeds by insinuation...He never strives for brilliant effect; harmony of tone is his continual preoccupation; science and intuition play a double role in the disposition of his colours, and each one of them casts new light on its neighbour, and as it were extracts a confession from it.
(Quoted in J. Russell, Vuillard, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1971, p. 96).
The present painting shows Marie Justine Alexandrine Michaud Vuillard, the artist's mother, at work in her apartment. She was listed professionally as a corsetière, a corset-maker, not a couturière or dressmaker as many have assumed, although some part of her business would have probably involved sewing dresses. Mme Vuillard and her husband, a retired tax collector, moved their family from the provincial town of Cuiseaux to Paris in 1877. In the final months of 1878 Mme Vuillard purchased the corset-making business and the rooms of a Mme Duval-Caron at 60, rue Neuve Saint-Augustin. The family moved several times after Vuillard's father died in 1884, remaining in the area around the Paris Opera district, where the garment trade in Paris was concentrated. The present work was probably painted at 10, rue de Miromesnil. At each address the dining room also served as Mme Vuillard's workplace.
The corset trade was at its peak during the final decade of the 19th century; government ministry figures show the output of lingerie in France in 1890 was double that of the production fifteen years later. Important corset-makers would have connections to major couturières in the city, but Mme Vuillard probably occupied a low rank in her profession, working with a pair of seamstresses and assisted by her daughter Marie. As in many cottage industries at this time Mme Vuillard and her help worked long, tiring hours. Edouard Vuillard was eleven years old when his mother became a corsetière. For the next twenty years, until his mother retired in 1898, the rooms in which she worked were the center of Vuillard's world.
For an artist coming of age in the decade of the Symbolists, these surroundings provided an unlikely but nonetheless unavoidable source of subject matter. It was a quiet, interior world, reminiscent of the paintings of Vermeer and Chardin. It was deeply feminine, but not in the usual Symbolist sense, in which women were usually idle and passive objects of desire. Instead, the women in Vuillard's world were industrious, self-supporting and deeply involved in their work.
Vuillard admired their patience and skill, and he assimilated into his own work many of the qualities that he saw in theirs. At the outset of his career he generally worked in small formats, as seen in the present painting, and composed his interior scenes like a seamstress cutting pieces of plain and patterned cloth and patiently stitching them together to form a whole garment. One may imagine Vuillard working on his small panels with same close proximity and self-absorbed concentration that Mme Vuillard displays in her son's depiction of her.
In works of this kind Vuillard successfully adapted the aesthetics of Symbolism, the lessons of Paul Sérusier's famous Nabi landscape Le Talisman (Guicheteau, no. 2), and the inventive flatness of japonisme to the realism of his subject matter. "For all their earthiness and concern for telling detail, these paintings transcend the merely workaday to a realm of emotional truth that is beyond specific time and place" (E.W. Easton, exh. cat., The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, op. cit, p. 26). The rooms at 10, rue de Miromesnil were probably more Spartan than the family's later quarters on the rue Saint-Honoré, where they moved in 1893. In the present painting the absence of decorative wall papers in the background, the subdued tonal harmonies, and the clever use of the tondo format to circumscribe the scene, contribute to a simple, yet timeless and ritualistic aspect. The novelist André Gide later wrote about Vuillard:
There is nothing sentimental or high-fatulin' about the discreet melancholy which pervades his work. Its dress is that of everyday. It is tender, and caressing For all his success, I can sense in Vuillard the charm of anxiety and doubt. He never brings forward a color without making it possible for it to fall back, subtly and delightfully, into the background. Too fastidious for plain statement, he proceeds by insinuation...He never strives for brilliant effect; harmony of tone is his continual preoccupation; science and intuition play a double role in the disposition of his colours, and each one of them casts new light on its neighbour, and as it were extracts a confession from it.
(Quoted in J. Russell, Vuillard, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1971, p. 96).