Le faisan

Vuillard's earliest recorded paintings from 1887-1888, done while he was a student at the Académie Julien, were still-lifes (Salomon and Cogeval, nos. I-1--I-39). He revisited this genre periodically during the 1890s, while he was affiliated with the Nabi painters. The chief influence on Vuillard's still-life painting was that of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), whose work had a continuing impact on virtually every French painter who treated the still-life after him, including the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and later modern painters. Vuillard admired Chardin's use of humble subjects, and what he described in his journal as the "pure and simple pleasures" of his tonal harmonies (quoted in E. Easton, The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, exh. cat., The Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1989, p. 145). The inverted 'T' composition of the suspended pheasant and loaf of bread in the present painting recalls that in Chardin's Faisan mort et gibicière, 1760 (Rosenberg, no. 160; coll. Staatliche Museen, Berlin). Indeed, the influence of Chardin extended to Vuillard's intimate interiors as well, in his use of subjects and settings drawn from every day middle-class life, as well as the apparent, but discreetly understated emotional relationships between the characters in his compositions.