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Lot Essay
The Vuillard scholar Antoine Salomon has suggested that the present sheet, datable to circa 1928, may depict Miche Marchand (1888–1942), the wife of the playwright, screenwriter and noted patron of Vuillard, Léopold Marchand. Born Michalina (Misz) Hertz in Łódź, she first married the Franco-Polish playwright Alfred Savoir Poznański in 1908. Vuillard was acquainted with Miche from at least 1910, when he portrayed her as a young woman, two years after her marriage to Poznanski, in a striking portrait now held in the Tate, London. Following her divorce in 1921, she married Léopold Marchand the following year. Miche Marchand, who was Jewish, took her own life in July 1942, shortly before the Vel’ d’Hiv mass arrest of Jews in Paris orchestrated by the Nazis.
Through her close friendship with Lucy Hessel, the wife of Vuillard’s famed dealer, and the artist’s enduring muse and model for nearly four decades, Miche occupied a central position within the intimate social circle that nourished Vuillard’s late work. Miche Marchand appears in several significant compositions from the artist’s later career. Most notably, she is included in Dans le salon, le soir, rue de Naples of 1933 held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where she is seated at the left of the composition alongside Lucy Hessel and her adopted daughter Lulu, within the richly observed interior of the Hessel family’s Parisian apartment. Miche Marchand is also depicted in the reworked version of Vuillard’s monumental Le Grand Teddy of 1930 held in the Musée d’Art Moderne, Geneva, underscoring her lasting presence within the artist’s personal and artistic milieu.
Through her close friendship with Lucy Hessel, the wife of Vuillard’s famed dealer, and the artist’s enduring muse and model for nearly four decades, Miche occupied a central position within the intimate social circle that nourished Vuillard’s late work. Miche Marchand appears in several significant compositions from the artist’s later career. Most notably, she is included in Dans le salon, le soir, rue de Naples of 1933 held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where she is seated at the left of the composition alongside Lucy Hessel and her adopted daughter Lulu, within the richly observed interior of the Hessel family’s Parisian apartment. Miche Marchand is also depicted in the reworked version of Vuillard’s monumental Le Grand Teddy of 1930 held in the Musée d’Art Moderne, Geneva, underscoring her lasting presence within the artist’s personal and artistic milieu.